Over the past two decades, a specific notion of "contemporariness" in the art world has been revived by turning the attention to documentary practices as well as by a renewed encounter with performance, dance and choreography.
Rather than seeing these parallel developments independently from each other, they need to be understood as intrinsically linked or connected.
A practical critique of the documentary image as evidence must not be limited to an ever-abstract deconstruction of the event. Through the concept of "counterenactment" it may open up to a variety of strategies of reading history against the grain and subverting its exchange value by undermining and revaluating meaning.
At the same time, critical performative practices may lead to a new understanding of the work of the artist as living labor, which is countering rather than re-affirming the economic laws of the spectacle and its ephemeral commodity form.