Recollections (2011), installation view of documentation, Photo: courtesy Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,JCS 2(2} pp.a59-177 Intellect Limited 2012 Journal of Curatorial Studies Volume 1 Number 2 @ 2022 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi 10 1386/ices12359 1 REESA GREENBERG Archival Remembering Exhibitions Abstract This article examines the variant of remembering exhibitions that adopts a documentary approach rather than attempting to replicate, riff on, or reprise the remembered exhibition. Case studies focus on examples that remember more than one exhibition, Discussions of Stationen der Modeme, Telling Histories, Parallel Chronologies, L’Attico and Recollections present the interplay between their celebratory functions and political import in relation to institutional, geographic and temporal considerations. In addition, the archival remembering exhibition is positioned in relation to the archive as it appears in recent contemporary art exhibition practices. In 2008 when I was trying to understand the trend of making exhibitions about past exhibitions, I proposed a new genre and called it ‘remem- bering exhibitions’. 1 identified three types or approaches: the replica, the riff and the reprise. The replica attempts to recreate, either partially or in entirety, the contents and form of a past exhibition; the riff uses an historic exhibition as a take-off point, often privileging a contemporary connection or interpretation; and the reprise re-presents or remembers exhibitions in the form of catalogues or online manifestations with visual and verbal information such as maps, diagrams, installation views, photo- graphs or descriptions of the art on display, video tours, essays, timelines and entries on individual artworks (Greenberg 2009).. At the time, I offered a number of reasons for why remembering exhibitions had become so prevalent. First, they attested to the current importance of exhibitions in society and the growing interest in the history of exhibitions, collective exhibition memory, and intersections of past exhibition theory and practice with contemporary concerns. Second, Keywords archival exhibitions remembering exhibitions Telling Histories L’Attico Recollections Stationen der Moderne Parallel Chronologies 359Resa Greenberg 160 The pieces recreated byAbramovie were Bruce Nauman's Body Pressure {4974}, Vito Acconei’s Seadbed (1972) Vale Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic (969), Gina Pane’s The Conditioning (2973), Joseph Bewys's How 10 Explain Pictures to «Dead Hare(1965), Abramevie’ Lips of Thomas (1975) and her Entering the Other Side (2005) see Westcott 2005). they manifested western culture's fascination with memory as a modality for constructing individual or collective identities. Third, they indicated a belief in a dynamic, rhizome-like notion of history where past and present are interwoven. Fourth, they spatialized memory, making it concrete, tangible, actual and interactive. And finally, they confirmed the under- standing that exhibitions can be dynamic cultural moments of active, widespread exchange and debate that are catalysts for changing percep- tions and practices (Greenberg 2009). Soon after, Elitza Dulguerova in L'Experience et son double (2010) refor- mulated my typology in relation to remembering exhibitions that incor- porated period photographs and exhibition reconstructions. She proposed two variants of replication: the replica-reprise premised on the erasure or denial of differences between past and present versions of exhibi- tions, and the replica-riposte, which ‘insist{ed] on variations between past and present, on the impossibility of reviving past experience today’ (Dulguerova 2010: 62, my translation). Dulguerova argued strongly and convincingly for remembering exhibitions that considered more than just the formal or theatrical aspects of past exhibitions by including either detailed information about their historical circumstances or marked evidence that the replica was a contemporary version of the past. Both Dulguerova and I were grappling with two inter-related ques- tions: how to best convey an historic exhibition in exhibition form, and how to best acknowledge, accommodate or address the present when recre- ating a past exhibition. Similar questions with regard to recreation have been asked in other fields, and the responses are instructive. For example, current art restoration policy in Italy insists on an approach that does not hide restored areas; they remain clearly visible, functioning as visual documentation of a past that is separate and distinct from the present yet permitting a fuller image of the original and a sense of the long history of the artifact or monument (e.g. Ara Pacis, Rome). In performance and the performing arts, there is vigorous debate about the merits of recreation as distinct from presenting only documentation (Bénichou 2010). The recon struction of historical ballets is seen as particularly problematic because until the introduction of Labanoiation in 1928 there was no common system of dance notation. Even with Labanoiation, there remain prob- lems with precise re-interpretation: sets, costumes, music, lighting, etc. Attempts such as the Kirov's 1999 reconstruction of Swan Lake are often characterized as creative contemporary choreography rather than accu- rate reconstructions of the past, even though they purport to be just that (Matters 2008). Although based on extensive records, including videos, Marina Abramovic’s 2005 recreations of five iconic performance art events by other artists from the 1960s and 1970s, plus two of her own, in Seven Easy Pieces, performed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, were equally controversial. By recreating performance art that was not hers and, in effect, creating new artworks, Abramovic raised questions about the relevance of originals and their documentation for remembering exhi- bitions that few muscums would dare Because of our interest in the original exhibition and its spatial- ized relation to the present, neither Dulguerova nor I examined exhibi- tions comprised predominantly of archival material, the standard form