Waiting for Tear Gas: Images between the Power of the Many and the Violence of the Police State

Abstract

The publication works as a catalogue of the exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, "Rewinding Internationalism: Scenes from the 1990s, today". The project as a whole thinks through the construct of internationalism through new commissions and collaborative research within the context of the museum confederation L’Internationale and their four year programme ‘Our Many Europes’. As an experiment in how the form and processes of exhibition making produce meaning, the show explores what the 1990s — a moment of seismic shifts across society and culture — mean today. This publication includes essays and interviews by artists, curators and researchers involved in the project, accompanied by extensive installation views from the Van Abbemuseum. Pablo Martínez's essay on Allan Sekula's "Waiting for Teargas" reveals how the work marks the anti-globalisation movement of the 1990s and the emergence of the multitude through Sekula’s particular use of the camera — among bodies on streets — and to resist a single representation of the multitude’s struggle. Pablo’s insistence on interlacing context, content and form similarly resonates with many aspects of the exhibition.