‘We’re Using These Bodies to Talk About Something Else’: Watch Carrie Mae Weems Explain Her Work Using Students to Restage Traumatic Historical Events

In exclusive interview filmed as part of Art21’s flagship series  Weems explains a project she organized featuring university students reenacting pivotal historic moments, including the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the Kent State shootings.

“We revisit the past,” Weems explains in the video, which first aired back in 2009. “The students examine the facts and will participate in the construction of history, a history that has been told to them by others—but now, with their own bodies, they engage their own dark terrain, their own winter.”

By restaging these critical moments of collective trauma and memory, the students take ownership of their country’s history and pain with compassion, creating their own physical memories. In artworks like Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment (2008) and  (2003-4), Weems is part of the artist’s ongoing work to “look at this history, to really think about where we are now, contemporarily.” 

 

This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of news-making artists. A new season of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century  PBS. Catch all episodes of other series, like New York Close Up and Extended Play, and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

 

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