There are as many different important dates
as there are different wars and love stories.
Take 9/11
11 September 1922
The British government promised European Zionists a homeland for Jews in Palestine.
11 September 1990
George Bush Sr. declared war against Iraq.
11 September 2001
Hijacked jetliners hit the World Trade Center in New York, destroying the Twin Towers.
12 September 1977
Steve Biko died in South African police custody.
12 September 2007
My mother died after noon.
Expiring Dates. Written for (together with Homage to the Polaroid, Measuring your own Grave, Framing and Naming, Southern Comfort, North Africa (Woman of Algiers) and Beaches ain’t what they used to be) and first published in Marlene Dumas, Measuring your own Grave, (cat.), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2008, p.179; and included in Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, second edition (revised and expanded) Koenig Books London, 2014.
Expiring Dates was originally published with the title Expiration Dates in a version without the line ‘11 September 1990 – George Bush Sr. declared war against Iraq’. The text was also included in Marlene Dumas, p.206, Phaidon, 2009, there without the line ‘11 September 2001 – Hijacked jetliners hit the World Trade Centre in New York, destroying the Twin Towers’.