Ten winter landscape paintings gently bob up and down against the night sky, held up by young women and men, whose earnest faces peer over the damaged surfaces of the canvases. This barely moving vignette is the focus of Aram Lee’s video A Dissonance of Landscapes (2019), whose location on a boat is discernible only from the sound of water and the distant hum of an engine. The moving vessel is rendered invisible, lending a certain abstraction to this unspoken conversation between static objects and people. We are left to imagine the dark stillness of the surrounding landscape and to scan the paintings’ imagery for clues about the significance of this obscure nocturnal event.¹

The frozen terrains depicted in the paintings are reminiscent of Northern Europe, yet there is something about the stylized frills of the rock formations, the flattened rendering of the human figures, and the translucent quality of the white vistas that make it impossible to securely identify the works. Rather, in being “almost but not quite” Dutch or Flemish, Scandinavian or Germanic, they reveal their status as something “other.” Excavated by the artist from the archives of Amsterdam’s Tropical Museum, built as an ode to its colonial exploits, these are Cantonese paintings from the 1800s, made by artists living in a subtropical region. These depicted winter scenes are forged by imagination as well as being informed by traditional Chinese repertoires, and by prints and drawings brought by Dutch traders. Their heterogeneous landscapes are not fictitious representations; they bear witness to an intercultural imaginary, to a conversation still waiting to be heard.

In Lee’s video, these “ten export landscapes” are taken on a precarious journey from Amsterdam’s IJ channel to the open sea. Instead of telling us “about” histories of Dutch-Chinese trade and uneven cultural exchange, she plunges us into an underexamined space between centuries and continents; a tale whose neglect is materially manifest in the paintings’ cracked and roughly taped surfaces. The darkness of the scene intimates that this space is located in the mind as much as in material reality. We become fellow travelers in this imagined geography, not knowing our destination, but experiencing how the journey unfixes stable markers. We notice that certain occupants of the boat have Asian features, echoing the physical presence of the Chinese painters whose names have gone unrecorded, while the gait and physique of other passengers might have stepped out of a Rembrandt painting, reminding us that the genealogies of colonial histories lead to the present. Yet all of the boat’s occupants are familiar with the lights of Amsterdam and the low bridges the boat must traverse on its way. Self-contained histories do not exist here, only entwined lives, past and present. There is no “arrival” to or from a fixed point, only the constant inextricable journeying of cultures and peoples; an acknowledgment that begs for a redistribution of cultural capital.

When contemporary artists engage with cultural heritage, artifacts often take on a quality of materiality. They are reformed, reimagined, and repositioned, occupying a state of alteration of the relation between time and meaning, matter and words. The best artworks never close down this dynamic, even when they are finished. It is precisely this destabilization of reality, this nonclosure of narratives that breathes new life into apparently known and thus closed historical accounts. Through contemporary art, we are refused the distance of historicity, the possibility of one account. Rather, as in Lee’s work, we are asked to temporarily inhabit an encounter, a specific episode in history. We are made to position ourselves, and in doing so, we find the multiplicity of ways in which the history or object at hand implicates us; the ways it doesn’t allow us to untangle the now from the then, to isolate one national or cultural account from another. We discover instead how it can have an often unexpected resonance with our current lives and our futures as the artwork circles the question of whose narrative is being told, dredging up the unevenness of cultural encounters and confronting us with their repercussions in contemporary society.

This quality is foregrounded in Quinsy Gario’s lecture-performance Whatever Floats Our Boats (2017), a work that presents three instances of resistance to colonial and dictatorial practices on and via the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, each with unfolding international consequences.² Using archival photos from museums, subtitled snippets of found music, and news footage from YouTube, Gario’s work reaches its audience on multiple levels that disallow neat categorizations into history, economics, culture, or current affairs. A slide-based presentation of visual material is accompanied by a soundtrack, created live by Jörgen Gario, which uses sound modulations and looping to underscore the unmooring of the presented information from its sources. The repetition of certain figures, images, and nations recur strategically, colliding historic and contemporary political events in a manner that exposes the ongoing relevance of apparently obscure narratives. The artist utilizes not only discursive text but also the force of interruptions as a vehicle to convey alternative significance to the material at hand. Pauses in speech introduce new inflections in meaning and moments of silence halt the linear progression of unexamined thought. A beat accompanies the episodic punch lines of Gario’s informal anecdotes, turning history into an unpredictable comedy of errors.

Humor thus becomes a crucial tool for entertaining multiple and contradictory significations. While Gario’s infectious laugh appears to mask the discomfort brought by narratives of imposition, the duration and recurrence of his laughter hold open spaces for the public to linger with the most uncomfortable nuggets of information. This is prominent, for example, when the artist mentions that a marine battleship reconquering Curaçao from the Venezuelans bears the name of Witte de With, a seventeenth-century Dutch admiral, whose role as the namesake of a contemporary art institution was hotly debated at the time of the performance. Rather than explaining this juxtaposition, Gario laughs mischievously at his revelation, allowing his smile to linger until its signification as humor is entirely dissipated. Gario’s work is exemplary of several ways in which contemporary artists draw agency from the situational contingencies of live performance to unsettle cultural authority. Laughter loosens up static areas of thought, suspending the closed logic of “common sense” to prepare the ground for decolonial perspectives.

When contemporary artists engage with cultural heritage, art’s unique medium-specific possibilities also enable the public to reencounters images that have become so familiar as to render them almost unseeable. In a radical search to re-see these omnipresent yet evasive narratives, artist Luiza Margan arranged for a crane to lift inhabitants of Rijeka, Croatia, the city of her birth, to stand face to face with a figure of a bronze Monument of Liberation that commemorates freedom from Fascism. This gesture of asking whether national narratives belong to us and whether we want to carry forward what they stand for is even more potent today than when Eye to Eye with Freedom was made in 2014, as right-wing populism increasingly holds electoral potency across many EU member states. Among Margan’s documentary photographs of the work, there is one portrait of a local woman’s face opposite that of the female Freedom figure. The physical resemblance between the two women, made evident by this juxtaposition, reminds us that the monument was created in the image and likeness of its people. Yet the statue’s idealized features foregrounds the gap between politics as symbol and idea; as something that differentiates itself from the lived reality of individuals, whose faces are marked with trajectories of privilege or poverty, of well-being or suffering.

By pausing the running narratives so we can stop and scan them up-close, art often rehumanizes history. We are invited to recognize our weaknesses, our strengths and our individual agency in the apparently insignificant and banal situations that underpin the workings of all power structures. Arin Rungjang’s digital video and mixed media installation 246247596248914102516… And Then There Were None (2017), exhibited in Documenta 14, comes to mind for the way it holds open these contradictory facets of human experience. Having noticed that the last signature in Hitler’s guestbook was that of a Thai ambassador, Prasat Chuthin, Rungjang took his memoir as the departure point for research into why Thailand was the only one in Southeast Asia to align with the Axis during the Second World War. I am still haunted by that moment in the film in which the narrator recounts Chuthin’s first impression of Hitler —as a “real gentleman.” Spoken in the present tense, we sense urgently that history cannot see itself being made; that the future consequences of the present moment may be dangerously unforeseeable. Refusing images of war or historical figures, Rungjang juxtaposes this account with documentation of his process of creating a cast bronze replica of Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, erected in 1939. Collapsing past and present, we are immersed in history unfolding as a process. As the ambassador recounts the loneliness and suffering of his subsequent imprisonment in a Read Army jail, Rungjang asks us to watch two contemporary dancers enacting intimacy, dependence, and threatened power struggles in the unlikely setting of a contemporary German car park. Subsequently, the camera pans across a placard that marks the site as the location of Hitler’s bunker. In the installation, this film is presented together with the bronze replica, a facsimile of Hitler’s guestbook and oil-painted portraits of the ambassador and his wife. In this way And Then There Were None raises questions about Thai democracy, past and present, insisting on their intertwinement.

Artists render visible what is missing in the cultural archive, often moving into the symbolic realm to recover traces or fragments that evoke what cannot be seen or what can only be made present by marking its absence. Rather than supplementing missing images or seeking “complete” knowledge or understanding, contemporary art shines light on the unknown and unknowable aspects of cultural heritage. Using the material-conceptual possibilities inherent in art’s many media, contemporary artists seek to allow knowledge to remain in a state of emergence, forming a kind of “nonknowledge.” Rejecting the desire to know (and implicitly control) cultural narratives, contemporary art touches the fabric of cultural heritage with a rare intensity.