The curatorial includes the post production artistic practices that bring together within a particular time and space related framework disparate images, objects, as well as other material and immaterial phenomena. In its performative aspects that seek to challenge the status quo, the curatorial also includes elements of choreography, orchestration and administrative logistics. Edited by director and writer Maria Lind, this book brings together a diverse group of curators, artists, art historians, educators and thinkers, all of whom reflect on the curatorial motives, tendencies and tactics, pitfalls and exegeses in translating and thus performing cultural heritage. Contributors include Doug Ashford, Beatrice von Bismarck and Eungie Joo.
Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field’s characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.
A distinguished group of artists, curators, and writers probe the changing face of curating in dance, the visual arts, film, and writing. They explore cutting-edge developments in electronic art, art/science collaboration, non-gallery spaces, and virtual fields in this essential read for scholars, curators, and art enthusiasts alike.
Examining the artistic, intellectual, and social life of performance, this book interrogates Theatre and Performance Studies through the lens of display and modern visual art. Moving beyond the exhibition of immaterial art and its documents, as well as re-enactment in gallery contexts, Guy's book articulates an emerging field of arts practice distinct from but related to increasing curatorial provision for ‘live’ performance. Drawing on a recent proliferation of object-centric events of display that interconnect with theatre, the book approaches artworks in terms of their curation together and re-theorizes the exhibition as a dynamic context in which established traditions of display and performance interact. By examining the current traffic of ideas and aesthetics moving between theatricality and curatorial practice, the study reveals how the reception of a specific form is often mediated via the ontological expectations of another. It asks how contemporary visual arts and exhibition practices display performance and what it means to generalize the ‘theatrical’ as the optic or directive of a curatorial concept. Proposing a symbiotic relation between theatricality and display, Guy presents cases from international arts institutions which are both displayed and performed, including the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, and assesses their significance to the enduring relation between theatre and the visual arts. The book progresses from the conventional alignment of theatricality and ephemerality within performance research and teases out a new temporality for performance with which contemporary exhibitions implicitly experiment, thereby identifying supplementary modes of performance which other discourses exclude. This important study joins the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies with exciting new directions in curation, aesthetics, sociology of the arts, visual arts, the creative industries, the digital humanities, cultural heritage, and reception and audience theories.
Curating Dramaturgies investigates the transformation of art and performance and its impact on dramaturgy and curatorship. Addressing contexts and processes of the performing arts as interconnecting with visual arts, this book features interviews with leading curators, dramaturgs and programmers who are at the forefront of working in, with, and negotiating the daily practice of interdisciplinary live arts. The book offers a view of praxis that combines perspectives on theory and practice and looks at the way that various arts institutions, practitioners and cultural agents have been working to change the way that art and performance have developed and experienced by spectators in the last decade. Curating Dramaturgies argues that cultural producers and scholars are becoming more cognizant of this overlapping and transforming field. The introductory essay by the editors explores the rise of interdisciplinary live arts and its ramifications in cultural and political terms. This is further elaborated in the interviews with 15 diversely placed arts professionals who are at the forefront of rethinking and consolidatingthe ever-evolving field of the visual arts and performance.
A handbook of new curatorial strategies based on pioneering examples of curators working to offset racial and gender disparities in the art world Current art world statistics demonstrate that the fight for gender and race equality in the art world is far from over: only sixteen percent of this year’s Venice Biennale artists were female; only fourteen percent of the work displayed at MoMA in 2016 was by nonwhite artists; only a third of artists represented by U.S. galleries are female, but over two-thirds of students enrolled in art and art-history programs are young women. Arranged in thematic sections focusing on feminism, race, and sexuality, Curatorial Activism examines and illustrates pioneering examples of exhibitions that have broken down boundaries and demonstrated that new approaches are possible, from Linda Nochlin’s “Women Artists” at LACMA in the mid-1970s to Jean-Hubert Martin’s “Carambolages” in 2016 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Profiles key exhibitions by pioneering curators including Okwui Enwezor, Linda Nochlin, Jean-Hubert Martin and Nan Goldin, with a foreword by Lucy Lippard, internationally known art critic, activist and curator, and early champion of feminist art, this volume is both an invaluable source of practical information for those who understand that institutions must be a driving force in this area and a vital source of inspiration for today’s expanding new generation of curators.
Artists in the Archive explores the agency and materiality of the archival document through a stunning collection of critical writings and original artworks. It examines the politics and philosophy behind re-using remains, historicising this artistic practice and considering the breadth of ways in which archival materials inform, inflect and influence new works. Taking a fresh look at the relationships between insider know-how and outsider knowledge, Artists in the Archive opens a vital dialogue between a global range of artists and scholars. It seeks to trouble the distinction between artistic practice and scholarly research, offering disciplinary perspectives from experimental theatre, performance art, choreography and dance, to visual art making, archiving and curating.
A curatorial situation is always one of hospitality. It implies invitations to artists, artworks, curators, audiences, and institutions; people and objects are received, welcomed, and temporarily brought together. It offers resources for material and physical support while also responding to a need for recognition, respect, or attention. Finally, and very importantly, a curatorial situation operates in the space between an unconditional acceptance of the other and exclusions legitimized through various rules and regulations. This publication analyzes, from the perspective of hospitality, the curatorial within the current sociopolitical context through key topics concerning immigration, conditions along borders, and accommodations for refugees. The contributions in this volume, by international curators, artists, critics, and theoreticians, deal with conditions of decontextualization and displacement, encounters between the local and the foreign, as well as the satisfaction of basic human needs. Hospitality: Hosting Relations in Exhibitions is the third volume in the Cultures of the Curatorial book series. Copublished with Kulturen des Kuratorischen, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig Contributors Beatrice von Bismarck, Nanne Buurman, Maja Ćirić, Alice Creischer, Andrea Fraser, Lorenzo Fusi, Wiebke Gronemeyer, Erik Hagoort, Anthony Huberman, Thomas Locher, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Dieter Roelstraete, Stefan Römer, Jörn Schafaff, Andreas Siekmann, Ruth Sonderegger
During its impressive career over the last decades the term 'performative' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused. The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and other cultural utterances, but it also emphasises the often dismissed, colloquial notion of the performative as something being 'theatre-like', believing that those two strands are in fact interdependent and intertwined. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats investigates an array of staged situations, from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums, theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects, and asks how 'theatre-like' strategies and techniques can in fact enable 'reality making' situations in art, and how, as a consequence, curating itself becomes staged, dramatised, choreographed, and composed. With contributions by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Knut Ove Arntzen, Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi, Claire Bishop, Beatrice von Bismarck, Rui Catalão, Vanessa Desclaux, Tim Etchells, Galerie, Karin Harrasser, Shannon Jackson, Ana Janevski, Lina Majdalanie, Ewa Majewska, Florian Malzacher, Maayan Sheleff, Gerald Siegmund, Claire Tancons, Kasia Tórz, Rachida Triki, Jelena Vesić, Joanna Warsza, and Catherine Wood. A publication by House on Fire, Live Art Development Agency & Alexander Verlag Berlin. The book series Performing Urgency is supported by the Culture Programme of European Union.
Performance in the Museum charts the main stages of the inclusion of performance in the museum from the 1970s to the present day. While performance emerged in the late 1960s as an anti-institutional form of art, it has recently gained an extraordinary visibility in contemporary art museums. This book focuses on three specific areas affecting museums: how to display performance art; conservation of performance art; and acquisition. What emerges from this study is that the museum, although rarely anticipating the specific issues raised by performance, has assumed a unique position in devising curatorial strategies adapted to this medium. The crux of Performance in the Museum is the visibility recently given to performance in museums. Through close analysis of a selection of exhibitions and curatorial practices from many different parts of the world, and from specific periods from the past fifty years, this book identifies key moments of the integration of performance in the museum, thus filling a crucial gap both in the history of performance and curatorial studies. Despite the recent surge of exhibitions on performance and the part played by museums in this phenomenon, the history of the display, the conservation and the acquisition of live performance remains largely uncharted. This book offers a thought-provoking and highly readable assessment of some fundamental questions in contemporary curatorial practice.
