Firstsite, Colchester have confirmed that they will present Play It Again: The art of remaking, an exhibition featuring ‘remade’ objects, events and films, produced by artists and the public. The exhibition showcases how history, contemporary culture and our own everyday experiences inspire repetition, remaking and reenactment in different forms.
The exhibitionincludes the work of contemporary artists Heather Agyepong, Laura Eldret, Michel François and Guillaume Désanges, Sofia Hultén, Hetain Patel, David Sherry, Allison Smith and Gillian Wearing. Also on display will be Star Wars Uncut, a project that was produced through ‘crowdsourcing’ material from members of the public, and historic reproductions made by Peter Shorer.
Alongside live action role-play, reenactmenthas traditionally focused on immersion into history, enabling an individual to experience a past era, event or lifestyle. Play It Again engages with artists, makers and fans to explore how this enthusiasm transfers into art and popular culture.
Included in the exhibition is Gillian Wearing’s seminal film Dancing in Peckham (1994), in which Wearing dances in a Peckham shopping mall as if in her own bedroom, to the bemusement of passers-by. The work was inspired by a woman Wearing saw dancing madly by herself at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Rather than film the woman dancing, Wearing set out to re-create the scene. Dancing in Peckham is a portrait in which rather than depict another person, the artist attempts to become them.
Hetain Patel’s work uses the language of popular culture and performance to explore identity formation.
In The First Dance (2012), Patel’s boyhood fantasies of becoming a kung fu warrior manifest in the restaging of a scene from the Ang Lee-directed film, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’(2000). The film’s narrative is relocated to the domestic reality of Patel’s South London flat and the lead roles are played by him and his wife. Fiesta Transformer (2013) is a sculpture created by Patel with his father who is a mechanic. It celebrates the artist’s passion for the 1980s ‘Transformers’ cartoon and action figure franchise, converting Patel’s 1988 Ford Fiesta into a squatting human-like figure.
