Didem Pekün, susan pui san lok, Wendelien van Oldenborgh: Rewinding Internationalism

Rewinding Internationalism is conceived as a score across installation, sound, film, research presentations and live rehearsals. It includes Disturbed Earth (2021), a new film by Didem Pekün, REWIND / REPLAY (2022) a commissioned multimedia installation and script by susan pui san lok, Horizontal (1995) by Wendelien van Oldenborgh, an extended research presentation introducing a number of collaborative research projects and the sounds of Belgian New Beat. 

Press rewind and you go back to a part of a song or a scene in a film. Something happens in the act of rewinding, though. The magnetic tape of a cassette or VHS gets scrambled. The section of the song, now replayed out of sequence, becomes abstracted. If you continuously rewind and replay—to borrow the title of susan pui san lok’s new work in the exhibition—the recorded fragment becomes untethered from its source. Within an exhibition that is in dialogue with the 1990s, when the construct of internationalism was in a deep state of flux across art and politics, the term “rewinding” is an attempt to scramble histories and ideas that have been “played out”, opening them up to new interpretations. 

At its best, the promise of internationalism serves as a counter to the divisions of nationalism or the homogenising effects of globalisation, and draws on a long history of transnational solidarity foregrounding relations across people, ideas, places and histories. In the 1990s, the ascendancy of globalisation and the proclaimed “End of History” coincided with the deadly revival of ethnonationalisms within Europe, for which the “international community” were found wanting; internationalism as a political project gave way to what Didem Pekün terms “bureaucratic incompetence” from supra-national bodies. Within the art system a “New Internationalism” was embraced, calling for an end to the centring of Western European and US positions, yet it remained conceptualised from the very position it sought to counter. Forms of cultural and political resistance to globalisation or rising nationalism offered inspiring examples of how internationalism might be rethought from highly situated, local contexts. 

Rather than represent a history or offer a definition of internationalism, the exhibition moves between—rewinds—different sites and scenes as prompts to consider how to relate to the prospect of internationalism today. Anchored around two new works by pui san lok and Pekün and running across the gallery, cinema and corridors of Netwerk Aalst the exhibition shows a confident disregard for the authority of the archive, instead redeploying material as ingredients for scripts, scores and samples. The exhibition has been developed during a time of global pandemic when the idea of internationalism is again unstable. The closure of national borders, prolonged isolation and screen time have had profound effects on people’s sense of place, and relating to one another. Equally, the pandemic has induced a sense of being untethered and out of sequence. Rewinding Internationalism’s fragmented rehearsals across space and time speak to the current sense of uncertainty, foreboding and repetition.

Research projects: Revista de Critica Cultural, The Three Ecologies and Internationalist Feminism (1991 onwards) developed with Paulina Varas; Keepers of the Waters (Chengdu and Lhasa, China, 1995-1996) developed with Sebastian Cichocki; Contemporary Art of the Non-Aligned Countries (Jakarta, 1995) developed with Bojana Piškur and Grace Samboh; ADN (Association pour la Démocratie à Nice), Carnivals Independents and Les Diables Bleus (1991-2004) 

New Beat soundtrack: Steven Keymeulen

Curator: Nick Aikens

Opening: February 19, 2–6pm, with live rehearsals at 3pm and 5pm.
Film screenings: March 3, 7:30pm, Last Angel of History and Mikrohaus, or the black atlantic?
REWIND / REPLAY: March 25, 7:30pm, live rehearsal by susan pui san lok
The story of New Beat and Aalst: April 30, talk and listening session with Steven Keymeulen
Chaos Culte: April 30, concert presented by Alosta Souls

Rewinding Internationalism will be presented in an expanded form at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (opening November 2022) and the Villa Arson, Nice (opening June 2023).

An exhibition booklet including a conversation between Didem Pekün, susan pui san lok and Nick Aikens, accompanies the exhibition.