192
On the ‘Evental’ Installation
Contemporary Art and Politics of Presence
Anthony Gardner, University of Melbourne
Late in 2007, Sweden’s so-called second
city of Göteborg hosted its fourth International
Biennial for Contemporary Art, an exhibition ti-
tled ‘Rethinking Dissent: On the Limits of Politics
and the Possibilities of Resistance’. The curators’
aim was explicitly portentous: to refigure art’s rela-
tions to politics amid the controversies of war. Yet
despite the implications of its title, the exhibition
was curiously familiar in terms of theme and con-
tent. As with many of the world’s seemingly innu-
merable biennales, triennales and other large-scale
exhibitions, ‘Rethinking Dissent’ interspersed a
smattering of local artists among other names—
such as Lida Abdul, Melik Ohanian, Thomas
Hirschhorn—made internationally recognisable
through previous appearances on these circuits.
And contra Terry Smith’s claim that a ‘retreat
from broad-scale engagement … has characterised
all biennales after Documenta 11’1, ‘Rethinking
Dissent’ joined an ever-growing list of such exhibi-
tions seeking to tackle directly some of the most
infamous and frequently televised of recent world
events, and the ways in which those events seem
to define what we mean by ‘politics’ today. That
list provides a key parameter for this paper, and
includes many significant exhibitions to emerge
after Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta: most nota-
bly, Charles Merewether’s 2006 Sydney Biennale
on ‘Zones of Contact’ between localised aesthetic
engagements and distant conflicts, sites and subjec-
tivities; Evelyne Jouanno’s ‘Emergency Biennale in
Chechnya’ (2005) with its aim ‘to mobilise … art-
ists … to reintroduce Chechnya to an international
audience’2; and Enwezor’s first post-Documenta
biennale in Seville in 2006, for which he sought
‘strong artistic interventions [in such matters as]
the terroristic imagination’ and especially the sus-
pensions of civil liberties and states of exception
found in the US-controlled internment camp at
Guantánamo Bay.3
The sense of familiarity in Göteborg was not
limited to a repetition of certain artists’ names
0531 CIHA_18_CONTEMP_4.indd 951
or biennale themes, but made most explicit in a
work that sets another parameter for this paper—
a work that was itself a new instalment, a rep-
etition, of an older installation. For upon enter-
ing Thomas Hirschhorn’s Concretion Re (2007),
visitors encountered a situation created by many
of Hirschhorn’s large-scale works: an almost-total
makeover of the gallery space and the creation of a
cramped, chaotic stage of cardboard and packing
tape, of mannequins’ bodies drilled with screws,
and of hundreds of photographs taped to walls
or displayed in fluorescent-lit vitrines. These were
photographs of people with congenital deformities
and of bodies mangled by the carnage in contem-
porary Iraq—the horror of which exceeded any-
thing presented in Western news broadcasts—as
well as innumerable install-shots of the initial work
that Concretion Re repeated: an installation titled
Concretion that Hirschhorn staged in 2006 in the
tiny French town of Thiers. And at the entrance
to Concretion Re, visitors could take away a photo-
copied article by the Franco-Tunisian philosopher
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, an acolyte of Alain Badiou,
on what Kacem called ‘Repetition suspended be-
tween two Events’.4
As with much of Hirschhorn’s practice, Con-
cretion Re seems both conceptually confusing
and formally chaotic. Nevertheless, it also sparks
significant questions about the relations between
artworks, exhibitions and political thematics at a
time when institutions like biennales have become
the primary mode of cross-cultural engagement in
contemporary art. Hirschhorn’s decision to dissem-
inate Kacem’s discourse about events and repetition
within his work is central to these questions, for the
text opens the possibility of conceiving Concretion
Re not only as a work of repetition but as somehow
suspended between ‘two Events’. The key questions
to ask, then, are: How might we conceive the ‘two
Events’ between which Concretion Re was poten-
tially suspended? Indeed, what might we mean by a
discourse of events in contemporary art?
951
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 952 Contemporaneity in Art and Its History
One approach is to analyse artworks such as
Hirschhorn’s through philosophical discourses of
‘the event’ to which Kacem’s text explicitly points.
These discourses articulate events as the rupturing
of normalised states of being from within: a rupture
that reveals a void within what we have hitherto
presumed to be natural, a void that is unnameable
because unaccounted for in our normalised states,
and which—to quote the great theorist of the event,
Kacem’s mentor Alain Badiou—‘compels us to de-
cide a new way of being’ as a consequence of this
destabilising rupture.5 Such discourses have a long
philosophical heritage and have regained promi-
nence through the generally distinct theorisations
of Foucault, Badiou and Deleuze and Guattari.6
Though not quite a new orthodoxy, they have
also emerged as central to much contemporary
art analysis—albeit often with a flippant disregard
for the extreme rarity and profound destabilisa-
tion of the ‘event’ as conceived by theorists such
as Badiou.7 These include, for example, Ackbar
Abbas’s claim that ‘Culture as event is non-obvious
and surprising, representing a kind of intrusion
of something else into the state of things’; or Tere
Vadén and Mika Hannula’s espousal of localised
encounters with artworks as ‘eventualisations’ that
provide ‘a certain kind of romanticism that is based
on hope. A hope of being able to figure out better
compromises’; or even Bernard Tschumi’s theory
of an architectural ‘event-space’ that is—however
paradoxical it sounds—designed for détournement
and unpredictability.8
If I hold a certain scepticism towards some
critics’ treatment of the event as an interdiscipli-
nary readymade, whose transference to contempo-
rary art reduces the event to a quotidian surprise,
I am equally sceptical of claims that Hirschhorn’s
work merely illustrates extant philosophical
premises.9 Hirschhorn has frequently rejected this
approach, declaring its determination by other dis-
ciplines to be a superficial engagement with art. His
Bataille Monument (2002), for example, is neither
a biography nor a depiction of Bataille’s philoso-
phies, but rather a means to examine more press-
ing concerns within contemporary practice (such
as how to engage people in the service of art rather
than delimit art to a service for people, or to test
voyeuristic impulses that may emerge when people
from different classes and cultures meet). Similarly,
I think that Hirschhorn’s invocation of Kacem’s
‘two Events’ is less in keeping with recent French
philosophising, and more an attempt to situate
Concretion Re within two conceptions of the event
that have greater pertinence for contemporary art.
Both arose in this paper’s anecdotal intro-
duction. The first is the exhibition, and particularly
0531 CIHA_18_CONTEMP_4.indd 952
though not exclusively large-scale exhibitions like
biennales, as an event that some people (myself
included) will cross hemispheres to experience.
This conception of exhibition-events is largely
driven by the priorities of publicity and threat-
ens to reconfigure curators as event managers.
Furthermore, while the exhibition-event draws
international audiences to sites often located at the
peripheries of the art world, such as Seville, Tirana
or Göteborg, attendance requires particular levels
of personal and/or institutional funding, and may
thus reinforce cultural and class-based divisions
between those who can and cannot experience an
‘event’. This is a crucial consideration to note and
I will return to it shortly.
The second understanding of events relates
to the representation of world events and con-
flict zones through global news broadcasts, the
evocation of which has become a central motif in
contemporary art. Concretion Re’s hundreds of
photographs of corpses and catastrophes in Iraq
provide one example of this resurgent representa-
tional trend. We can also think of sincere social
documentary and other photograph-based repre-
sentations that provide images of world events or
their aftermath as modes of alternative journalism,
and which have become a staple of recent ‘political’
exhibitions. These include Baghdad-based Ghaith
Abdul-Ahad’s straight photographs of Iraq’s war-
torn occupation, Josephine Meckseper’s photo-
graphs of demonstrations in Berlin, and Pamela
Wilson-Ryckman’s watercolours drawn from news
accounts of tragedy—all of which Okwui Enwezor
showed alongside many other artistic representa-
tions derived from media representations of trau-
matic world events in his Seville Biennale. Or, to
name two examples installed beside Hirschhorn’s
Concretion Re in Göteborg, Kabul-based Lida
Abdul’s allegorical videos about death and trauma
in Afghanistan, and Beirut-based Lamia Joreige’s
videoed interviews with survivors of Lebanon’s re-
cent wars, the indexicality of which is heightened
by the videos’ projection alongside the personal
possessions shown at the beginning of each inter-
view and which spark the interviewees’ subjective
accounts of life during the country’s conflicts.
As these examples suggest, there is today an
increasing tendency to merge these two kinds of
‘event’: to politicise an exhibition-event through re-
course to artistic representations of mediatised (and
particularly traumatic) world events; and to bring
images from the world’s so-called ‘peripheries’—
often, but not always, created by artists from those
‘peripheries’—to international attention through
exhibition-events. This convergence of events
is not surprisingly the legacy of ‘Documenta 11’,
23/6/09 1:20:24 PM

Enwezor’s all-consuming exhibition brimming with
documentary media and installations and which
remains the most significant event (in all senses of
the word) for art in recent decades. This conver-
gence of events is unsurprising in another way as
well, for both exhibition-events and documentary
media presented within them are profoundly and
perhaps even ontologically linked. That link is a
state that Douglas Crimp noted some thirty years
ago, albeit of the very different context of a New
York–style Postmodernism based primarily on
photographic imagery and performance: namely, a
state of presence that exists at the intersection of
the indexical (or the ‘having-been-there’) and the
theatrical (or the staged).10
We see this most obviously in the installation
of documentary media or images based on news
feeds: experiences of having been at particular
protests or personal testimonies of war, which are
designed to be seen, staged and installed for exhi-
bition viewers. ‘Presence’ equally resonates, though
slightly differently, through exhibition-events
and even installations as well: as a staged state of
‘having-been-there’ to experience their 3-dimen-
sional space and encounter the political and aes-
thetic dynamics—what critics now invariably call
the affects—between works within the frame of
an exhibition-event. These experiences and affects
are notoriously difficult (perhaps impossible) to re-
produce photographically.11 Anecdote, as a strate-
gic means to supplement photography’s limitations
and as an assertion of one’s particular encounters,
thereby becomes a crucial means for artists, view-
ers and critics alike to assert their clout within an
economy of presence.
Today, we are witnessing (or, better still, ex-
periencing) an amplification of Crimp’s belief that,
because of this state of presence, ‘It can be said
quite literally of the art of the seventies that “you
had to be there”’.12 Thirty years ago, of course, that
meant not just being in the presence of an artwork,
but ‘having to be’ in New York. Presence was in-
extricable from the authority of Manhattan and the
legitimation it provided. Now, as exhibition-events
and representations of world events converge
through an institutionalised presence of ‘politics’
in art, we find that the politics of presence remain
as potent as ever, if ultimately more complex. This
is not just because art’s putative globalisation has
replaced privileged centres with privileged vectors
and lines of frequent flights. Rather, that superfi-
cial understanding of decentralisation has induced
recurring forms of authority and legitimation that
cannot be dissociated from potentially productive
responses to art historical problems. The prolif-
eration of exhibition-events along the art world’s
0531 CIHA_18_CONTEMP_4.indd 953
On the ‘Evental’ Installation 953
former edges, for example, has garnered undeni-
ably important recognition for previously ignored
locales. It has also established opportunities for
artists and audiences from across the globe to cross
cultures and engage in exchanges during exhibi-
tion installation and vernissages. Concurrently,
however, such appeals to recognition through
exhibition-events maintain the authority of people
and institutions that can provide such recognition,
creating selective inclusions according to extant
markers of recognisability and which markers (as
Wu Hung suggestively observes) signify not equal-
ity but a ‘longing for contemporaneity’ on the part
of the still-subordinate.13
The longing for presence on the global stage
partially explains why exhibition-events are now a
major resource used by many state and corporate
stake-holders in order to garner recognition.
Romania, to cite one of myriad examples, hosted
an unprecedented six biennales in the mere twenty
months before its EU accession—arguably as
a sign of national ‘progress’ towards EU policy
standards and to deflect ongoing concerns about
the Romanian Government’s corruption in politics
and business.14 Such circumstances are not isolated
but part of a broader phenomenon that Latin
American critic George Yúdice labels the political
expediency of culture: that is, the treatment of
culture as a resource to promote other, some-
times quite problematic, political purposes.15 But
I also wonder whether we can invert Yúdice’s key
terms and discuss a parallel form of expediency, a
cultural expediency of politics, as another example
of this ‘longing for contemporaneity’: of culture’s
desire for renewed topicality and relevance amid
its supposed lack of quantification and national
benefit, and consequent funding cuts. The ever-
burgeoning turn to superficial representations
of world events in exhibitions, and claims to
‘strong artistic interventions [in such matters as]
the terroristic imagination’—as though terrorists
really cared what occurs within the over-protected
sanctum of a gallery—thus risk baring art’s longing
for relevance and social presence even as they seek
‘broad-scale engagement’.
The effects of this politics of presence for
artists can be equally problematic, especially given
the prevalence of alternative journalistic images
within exhibition-events like the Seville, Sydney
or Göteborg biennales. Such events have proven
pivotal to introducing international audiences
not only to previously ignored sites, but to artists
from previously ignored regions as well. The turn
within these exhibitions to subjective accounts and
testimonies of specific conflicts can also provide
significant rejoinders to the kinds of journalistic
23/6/09 1:20:25 PM
 954 Contemporaneity in Art and Its History
reportage seen daily in the news. But that inclusion
still leaves open the following question: To whose
journalism are these images, and perhaps these
artists, supposed to provide alternatives? Similarly,
as Catherine David has noted, there is also
something ‘very unfortunate, close to obscene’
about the frequent fusion of an artist’s biography
and the referent of a conflict zone, particularly
through the use and presentation of photographic
media.16 For while that referent can underscore the
presence of political conflict within an exhibition-
event, it can also reduce individual artists or
works to being representative of conflicts, trading
on artists’ presence at world events or, in some
cases, legitimating their inclusion in exhibition-
events through highly questionable metonymies
of national identity and tragedy. Crimp’s once-
cheerful claim that ‘you had to be there’ may thus
no longer be a colloquial declaration but rather a
forceful imperative: a politics of presence in the
wake of identity politics.
Many contemporary artists have reflexively
engaged with such politics in recent years. We can
think, for example, of Walid Raad’s problematisa-
tion of presence in artworks suspended between
fiction and fact; or the starkly different notions of
presence asserted through a number of Indigenous
Australian artists’ paintings and performances.
But I want to conclude this paper by returning to
Thomas Hirschhorn and his own reflexive engage-
ment with art’s politics of presence in recent ‘po-
liticised’ biennales.
In Seville, and unlike many of the artists select-
ed by Enwezor, Hirschhorn did not exhibit artistic
representations of journalistic images of geopoliti-
cal events. Instead, he created Re (2006), a work
that was also a kind of repetition: an archive of pho-
tographs taken during one of his previous works,
the Musée Précaire Albinet (2004). The Musée
Précaire was a prime exponent of what Hirschhorn
calls ‘making art politically’ as a counter to mak-
ing ‘political art’: Hirschhorn asked people from
Paris’s outer suburb of Aubervilliers to help him
create a temporary museum there, with artworks
borrowed from the Pompidou Museum’s collec-
tion. The Musée thereby presented an aesthetic
politics of engaging people and processes (like in-
ternships) that art discourse often ignores. By ex-
hibiting photographs of this process in Seville—as
well as videos of the Musée’s participants critically
reflecting on whether that process was indeed
‘political’—Hirschhorn suspended Enwezor’s as-
sumptions that art’s politics relate primarily to
contemporary events in Iraq or Guantánamo Bay.
For Hirschhorn, the presence of art’s politics lay
elsewhere: in Aubervilliers in 2004 rather than the
0531 CIHA_18_CONTEMP_4.indd 954
2006 Seville Biennale; in ‘making art politically’
rather than in representations of world events; and
in reflexivity about the limitations of aesthetic poli-
tics (such as creating temporary museums in out-
lying suburbs), rather than in demands for ‘strong
artistic interventions’ within dominant geopolitical
frames.
This process of deflecting political presence
to somewhere else, and towards another under-
standing of politics, also emerged in Hirschhorn’s
Concretion Re. The work frequently redirected
vision and presence. The surfeit of high-wattage
fluorescent lighting, and its constant reflection
off the ever-present packing tape, made trying to
see the photographs’ content as much an act of
avoiding the blinding light shining off them. When
Hirschhorn’s photographs were perceivable, the
sheer horror they contained—of skin peeled away
from faces, of faces grated into bitumen, of shat-
tered brains and other extremes of bodily destruc-
tion—far exceeded current moulds of alternative
journalism, and induced a different kind of blind-
ness: a turning away from the images through the
inability to stomach them. And beside each vitrine
and display, as though awaiting deflected gazes,
Hirschhorn presented another set of images: mov-
ing images of Hirschhorn himself, his lips moving
but his voice made inaudible as though rendered
mute in the face of these events; and videos taken
in the French town of Thiers of the installation that
Concretion Re repeated. These videos, alongside
the innumerable install-shots of the initial work,
thus revealed Concretion Re to be spectral and
simulacral, a repetition whose presence lay dislo-
cated between its current site in Göteborg and an-
other time and place in Thiers.
What this suggests, I think, is that Concretion
Re and his earlier repeated work in Seville were
knowing counters to the increasing convergence
of exhibition-events and images of world events
in contemporary art. If this convergence is often
intended to assuage an exhibition’s (and its host’s)
longings for contemporaneity, then Hirschhorn
suggested that it can also render artists mute and
audiences blinded. Art, perhaps, cannot engage in
actual interventions within, or dissent towards, con-
temporary geopolitics when encapsulated within
contemporary art’s notions of events. Hirschhorn’s
installations instead suggested another way of con-
ceiving art’s politics today: politics that emerged
in specific relation to, through, and in many ways
against, the purposive frames of presence asserted
in biennales like Seville or Göteborg, and which
were given form as a series of suspensions and redi-
rections. These suspensions lay between the pres-
ence of political imagery and constant deflections
23/6/09 1:20:25 PM

of vision away from what was present (whether
to spaces marked by blindness, or to the works’
initial incarnations in Thiers or Aubervilliers); or
between ‘the real thing’, as Hirschhorn labelled
one of his images in Göteborg, and repetitions that
were self-consciously simulacral. In other words,
these were suspensions in which the staged and the
indexical, as well as global politics and sophistic
engagements with them, constantly fought against
each other rather than folded into each other. As
a consequence, and as was especially the case in
Seville, Hirschhorn’s works sought to direct atten-
tion away from the biennale’s literal illustration of
world events, and their determination of what art’s
‘politics’ might be, so as to present examples of
aesthetic politics—of ‘making art politically’—that
lay beyond the biennale’s parameters.
These works were thus attempts to suspend or
even rupture the emergent conventions of politi-
cised aesthetics, and to reconsider what is voided
by those conventions: on the one hand, art’s gen-
eral inability to resist, let alone redirect, contem-
porary world events, and on the other, the ongoing
importance of institutional critique. This was not in
terms of disrupting museums’ architectural forms
(prevalent since the 1970s), but of re-evaluating
the various purposes underwriting art’s politics
or an artwork’s presence amid contemporary wars
and curatorial sophistry—that is, not simply site-
specific critiques, but purpose-specific critiques
particular to each artist and each exhibition-event.
It would be easy to term these installations’ rup-
tures of conventions ‘evental’ in the philosophical
sense—as we can recall, this is one way of inter-
preting ‘events’ today. But Hirschhorn somewhat
less portentously describes it as art’s political ‘au-
tonomy’17: not in the Greenbergian sense of art
vacuum-sealed from the everyday, but as art’s ca-
pacity to work through and defuse the need for
political legitimation determined by other sources.
This is a conception of autonomy that has long
underpinned Hirschhorn’s refusal to illustrate con-
temporary political events, and which, in recent
years, has sat suspended between such events and
the event of exhibitions, between the indexical and
the staged, and alongside art’s longings—however
earnest or expedient they may be—for contempo-
raneity and presence.
NOTES
1 Terry Smith, ‘Biennales in the Conditions of Con-
temporaneity’, Art and Australia, vol. 42, no. 3,
autumn 2005, p. 414.
2 Evelyne Jouanno, Emergency Biennale in Chechnya,
www.emergency-biennale.org/project.htm, viewed
9 August 2007.
0531 CIHA_18_CONTEMP_4.indd 955
On the ‘Evental’ Installation 955
3 Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Unhomely’, in Okwui Enwezor
(ed.), The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global
Society, BIACS, Seville, 2006, esp. pp. 13–16. This list
could easily be expanded to include the many other
exhibitions, large and small, held worldwide in recent
years that focus on similar themes.
4 Mehdi Balhej Kacem, ‘Event and Repetition’,
originally published in Failles, no. 2, spring 2006.
Reproduced and disseminated in Thomas Hirsch-
horn’s Concretion Re for ‘Rethinking Dissent’.
5 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding
of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, Verso, London, 2001,
p. 41.
6 ibid.; see also Michel Foucault et al., ‘Question of
Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, in
Kenneth Baynes et al. (eds), After Philosophy: End or
Transformation?, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987,
pp. 100–17; and Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari,
What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson &
Graham Burchill, Verso, London, 1994.
7 On the scarcity of Badiouan ‘events’—which he limits
to such circumstances as the French Revolution of
1792, China’s Cultural Revolution and Schönberg’s
development of the 12-tone scale in music—see
Badiou, p. 41, n. 5.
8 Ackbar Abbas, ‘Culture as Event in China’s Socialist
Market Economy’, in Robert Storr (ed.), Where
Art Worlds Meet: Multiple Modernities and the
Global Salon, Marsilio, Venice, c. 2006, p. 65; see
also Tere Vadén & Mika Hannula, Rock the Boat:
Localized Ethics, the Situated Self and Particularism
in Contemporary Art, Salon Verlag, Cologne, 2003,
p. 157; and Bernard Tschumi & Enrique Walker,
‘Avant-Propos: Bernard Tschumi in Conversation
with Enrique Walker’, Grey Room, no. 17, fall 2004,
pp. 119–20.
9 See, for example, claims that Hirschhorn’s work
represents and enacts philosophies of the ‘multitude’,
a revolutionary entity espoused by the philosopher
Antonio Negri, in Stéphane Sauzedde, ‘Au centre
de l’oeuvre de Thomas Hirschhorn: La notion de
Multitude’, Plastik, no. 4, autumn 2004, pp. 136–51.
10 Douglas Crimp, ‘Pictures’, October, no. 8, spring
1979, pp. 75–88. I owe many thanks to Huw Hallam
for our numerous discussions on the resonance of
Crimp’s early writings in contemporary art practice.
11 On contemporary art’s politico-aesthetic affects, see
Jill Bennett, ‘The Dynamic of Resonance: Art, Politics
and the Event’, Australian and New Zealand Journal
of Art, vol. 6, nos 2–7, 2005–06, pp. 67–81. Note also
that a clear and intriguing paradox emerges in relation
to art’s convergence of ‘events’: the experience of
installations and ‘exhibition-events’ are marked by
the limitations of photography, and yet ‘world events’
are presented within the frames of art through that
very medium. Word-limit constraints prevent proper
analysis here, but what this paradoxical coexistence
of presence suggests is the need to re-evaluate Walter
Benjamin’s well-known (but arguably dated) oppo-
sition between aura and mechanical reproducibility.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn,
Fontana, London, 1973, pp. 217–51.
12 Crimp, p. 77, n. 10.
13 Wu Hung, untitled commentary in Storr, p. 203, n. 8.
14 Details about the complaints and charges brought
against Romania’s former government can be found
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 956 Contemporaneity in Art and Its History
in ‘Romania: Human Rights Developments’, Human
Rights Watch World Report 2001, Human Rights
Watch, New York, 2001, pp. 308–9.
15 George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of
Culture in the Global Era, Duke University Press,
Durham, NC, 2003.
16 Catherine David, in Sandra Dagher, Catherine
David, Rasha Salti, Christine Tohme & TJ Demos,
0531 CIHA_18_CONTEMP_4.indd 956
‘Curating Beirut: A Conversation on the Politics of
Representation’, Art Journal, vol. 66, no. 2, summer
2007, p. 100.
17 Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Dis Pourquoi?! Dis
Pourquoi?!’, Cahiers du Musée National d’Art
Moderne, no. 100, summer 2007, pp. 115–16.
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