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‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ The immortal first line to L P Hartley’s The Go-Between wistfully condenses the problems inherent to memory and history Distant, intangible, unreliable, lost, our histories, at the levels of personal and national, are at best half-remembered and at worst actively misrepresented Within the sphere of contemporary art, and more specifically moving-image, artists seem increasingly to be responding to the challenges posed by reconstituting the past in order to chart collective and individual memory through a strategy of re-enactment   The function and effect of such work is powerful: as academic Andreas Huyssen states, ‘[the] past is not simply there in memory … it must be articulated to become memory’ A number of video works in the past decade have interacted imaginatively with archives and the documentary genre in order to reanimate marginalised stories and revisit personal or collective traumas In the latter case re-enactment draws on psychotherapeutic methods used in the treatment of post-traumatic stress In ‘talk therapy’ the patient is asked to discuss the traumatic experience, and through cognitive analysis find some way through the damage wrought Treatment is continued through ‘exposure therapy’ in which a patient is made to confront the very thing that they fear, and through repetition learn strategies to cope with it   Re-enactments also provide the artist with a means of representing the past using a theatricality that through its distancing of the viewer deconstructs history as truth, allowing for fresh interpretation Writer Rebecca O’Dwyer, defending re-enactment in contemporary art against charges of conservatism, reads it instead as an active form of remembering through which we can establish a new relationship to the past, a past understood as being in a constant state of flux Here we examine six moving image works that negotiate the past through reconstruction and re-enactment     Jeremy Deller, ‘The Battle of Orgreave’, (2001) Excerpt from The Battle of Orgreave from Artangel on Vimeo     For this Artangel commission, a masterpiece of re-enactment, Jeremy Deller orchestrated a