Performing The Past

Saturday, February 21
4:30 - 6:00 PM
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge Street

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.

Dr. Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator, and scholar from Kingston, Jamaica, whose practice meditates on questions of relation, intimacy, and the difficulties of reconciliation. They are an Associate Curator at Creative Time. With a commitment to citation influenced by Black Feminism, they believe that knowledge is created collectively, and lean into the vulnerability of uncertainty. Marsh seeks to ignite ongoing reflection rather than definitive answers.

They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are an alumna of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Marsh's writing has been published widely in artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, and arts journals, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Financial Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Momus, and ARTS.BLACK.