Performing the Past
In conversation with artists Alicia Grullón, Andrea Ray, Dread Scott, and Mark Tribe about reenactment and performance.
Exhibition: An Incomplete Hauntingat 601Artspace
Dread Scott Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019)
Join us for a conversation with artists Alicia Grullon, Andrea Ray, Dread Scott, and Mark Tribe about reenactment and performance. Guided by writer, curator, and scholar Dr. Gervais Marsh, the artists will discuss strategies that bridge history and memory by physically, emotionally, and intellectually recalling the past.
An Incomplete Haunting features Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment (2019), which restaged the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the largest slave rebellion in North America, to examine political power, slavery’s economic foundations, and the pursuit of freedom. Marching through today’s industrialized Orleans Parish, reenactors in period clothing carried flags and weapons that contrasted past resistance with present-day extractive landscapes, linking histories of enslavement to ongoing systems of exploitation. Mark Tribe’s Port Huron Project (2006–2008) series consists of videos documenting reenactments of Vietnam-era speeches by New Left leaders and activists—including Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Howard Zinn, and Cesar Chavez—performed at their original sites. The project connects earlier movements for justice to present-day struggles over war, inequality, and racism.
Andrea Ray’s The Sound of Women’s Rights (2020–25) layers audio from archival women’s marches in 1970; self-recorded audio from 2017 protests; recordings of women performing suffrage slogans (wearing Covid-era masks) in Ray’s hometown of Utica, New York; and other archival and online sources, tracing a continuous lineage of activism from the Equal Rights Amendment through the 2017 Women’s March to the present moment. Alicia Grullon’s video works combine reenactment and role-playing to capture collective solidarity during social crises: the then near-total ban on abortion in Texas in 2023; George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer; the exploitation of “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic; and the 2018 death of Jakelin Caal Maquin, a four-year-old Guatemalan girl who died of the flu at a U.S. migrant detention center. Recorded in her home, these videos demonstrate how creative practice can shape the moral and political labor of remembering.