ABSTRACT
The power to control the narrative, rather than any claim to truth, ensures historical legitimacy. The artists have highlighted and critiqued the "irreversible past" as the dominant chronosophy of historicity; deconstructed the way in which histories are intricately bound up with relations of power, ontologies and processes of legitimisation. The space, politics and epistemologies of representation are far from transparent or equitable. Yto Barrada raises questions about both authenticity and the invention of traditions, particularly those surrounding the geo-political construct of the nation-state, and explore the role that national museums and palaeontology have played in the articulation of nationalist identities. The possibility of art providing a space for collective organisation and protest is also manifested in Remaking Picasso's Guernica, a communal project by activists and artists who remade Picasso's Guernica as a sewn and stitched banner.
