Solo presentation at Liste 2026 with 243 Luz & Co



‘What happened or that which is said to have happened’ is both the title of the work and a quote from Trouillot’s book Silencing the past : power and the production of history where he discusses the latin distinction between res gesta and rerum gestatum, the event itself and it’s deciphering. In this book, Trouillot writes about the mechanisms of the production of history and its silences, using the context of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 as the subject of study. The installation is thought of as a « historical » diorama [diorama meaning to see through] that reconstructs the space in which the performative act of re-hanging the Guernica tapestry, after Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (a reproduction of the original painting), occurred at UN Headquarters three years ago, in 2022, after it was removed for “curatorial purposes” for multiple years. A lengthy video of 24 minutes on the UN YouTube page documents the process of re-installing the work, therefore presenting it as some sort of historical moment.

The mediatization of this moment happens decades after the first ‘Guernica scandal’ when the tapestry was covered with a blue drape shortly before the U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003. The motive for this gesture was uncertain and various theories were spread questioning wether it was due to the scandalous nature of having Collin Powell, then Secretary of State in the U.S, announcing the invasion of Iraq in front of the most famously known war painting or simply for the sake of journalists being able to shot with a simpler, plain backdrop.

Working from the various extracted frames of the video, the diorama offers a singular viewpoint of the ‘set’ where the action takes place. The diorama re-stage, not the space itself but the performative moment in space as presented in the video.



In other words a re-staging of a staged action. The aesthetic and photographic nature of the diorama poses as a singular ‘objective’ viewpoint of a space, it ‘freezes’ a moment, therefore encapsulating a multitude of viewpoints, what is shown and what is not, and the multiple narratives contained within. The installation interrogates on one hand the nature of this performative action, the context and the meaning it tries to generate. Its format, a decor, is a sort of ‘toyification’ of a moment which highlights the inherently theatrical nature inextricably linked to the medium of the film, its newsworthiness, and its surreptitious implications.



The cabinet presents a set of artefacts extracted from the scene: the same gloves used by the art handlers, a black shirt similar to the one they wear, an image of the painting hung that appears in the video to be looked at as a reference of where to hang the tapestry, a dollar coin and two fabricated documents. The documents, which are inspired by meeting minutes, aren’t a transcript but rather a summary of the event and the agents taking part in the scene, describing what was said and done. Merging different timelines and textual materials from UN digital archive meetings, newspaper articles and blogs, this textual collage becomes a sort of absurd screeplay, questioning accuracy in the making of evidence. Thus presented, the work echoes the dynamics generated by museography in its attempt to claim to produce a neutral viewpoint.

     



In addition to the diorama and installation is a series of analog prints made from photographs taken using objects and research materials surrounding the body of work. The photographs present an additional set of viewpoints on the subject through varying (out of focus) foci.
The selection emphasises the decision making process inherent to the medium, particularly to the idea of framing, of what’s left in and what’s left out of an image. The intentionally narrow view of the photographs questions the act of choosing equally inherent to historians, archivists, journalists, and mass media producers. The decision of what stays in focus and what falls to the edges is parallel to the decisions of who is left inside or outside of history, of an economic system, who has access to resources and functional institutions, who has rights, and ultimately who lives and who dies.

Install shots by Julian Blum