2017 Exhibition
2. Reenactor
LOCATION: The Detroit Historical Museum
Reenactor is an ongoing video projection that will run continuously in both daylight and nighttime, from 7 PM September 22 until midnight on September 23.
The film Reenactor depicts a small swarm of performers dressed in Confederate Civil War uniforms and white beards speckled with droplets of blood who wander the streets of a small southern city. The film begins in a bed and ends in a cemetery. The camera, like in a documentary, simply follows the performers as they enact various scenes: scrub a floor, bathe a child, climb stairs, wrestle in mud, hand out flyers and eat a mysterious red substance. The group invade a convenience store, haunt a mall, picnic in a junkyard and at times lie very still with trickles of blood flowing from their mouths. The pace of the film is unhurried and meditative using voice-over and music to create a tone which vacillates between the world we live in and the world that haunts our past.
Reenactor is a film about how we costume and theatricalize time in order to make sense of our past, our mortality. We dress reality up in history, documentary, biography, or art to re-stage and re-order the chaos of getting from one side of life to the other. Reenactor is a three and half hour old timey dress up dream play. I call Reenactor my Civil War film but the war I’m referring to is any great trauma that marks the land and its people such that ghosts are spawned and made restless in memories that haunt our living landscape. Most of the film was shot in the city of Nashville, Tennessee, in 2009 and 2010. Footage of historical reenactments was shot in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
pope.l
7.14.17
Live soundtrack performances by local musicians Marcus Elliot and Ben Willis will take place on Friday and Saturday evening during the festival hours of 7 PM to midnight.
Reenactor is supported by:
In partnership with:
Artist Information
Pope.L
Pope.L is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create art works in various formats, for example, writing, painting, performance, installation, video and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race and community. The goals for his work are several: joy, money and uncertainty— not necessarily in that order.
Recent exhibitions, performances, and projects include Whispering Campaign at documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); Claim (Whitney Version) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial (2017); PLAMA (The Spot), a commercial commissioned for On the Tip of the Tongue at Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2016); Baile at the 32nd Biennal de São Paulo (2016); The Freedom Principle at ICA Philadelphia (2016) and MCA Chicago (2015); The Public Body at Artspace, Sydney (2016); Less than One at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); Trinket at The Geffen Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); Black Pulp! at Yale School of Art, New Haven and IPCNY in New York (2016); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, CAM Houston, and Studio Museum in New York (2014); Claim at Littman Gallery, Portland State University, Portland, OR (2014); Cage Unrequited at Performa, New York (2013); Forlesen at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, Chicago (2013); and A Long White Cloud, Te Tuhi, Auckland, New Zealand (2013).
Pope.L is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the the Bucksbaum Award, Joyce Foundation Award, the Tiffany Foundation Award, the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, the Bellagio Center Residency, Solomon R. Guggenheim Fellowship, Andy Warhol Foundation grant, Creative Capital Foundation grant, Franklin Furnace/Jerome Foundation grant, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Artists Space grant, and more.