Questioning history : imagining the past in contemporary art

Within contemporary visual art and photography there has, for a number of years, been a growing interest in history. At the same time, history is presented as 'the' history with decreasing certainty, since social upheavals have, over the course of recent decades, led to a different view of 'the' history. The mass media have assumed the role of historiographers on a massive scale. The flipside of this development is that visual culture is gradually losing the ability to convey history in all its variety. The mediatization and globalization of our culture is leading to the dulling of our collective historical awareness. In reaction to this, contemporary artists are asking increasingly critical questions about the way in which the representation of the past is constructed. The attention paid to history among visual artists, photographers, filmmakers and other image producers may indeed be nothing new, but Questioning History focuses on recent developments that are essentially different in their handling of images.