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Upcoming
Although the project’s active phase has concluded, we will continue to share updates on this website about relevant and related events.
Past
Recordings of previous events are available via each event’s page.
“Common Ground:” artist and performance scholar Felipe Ribeiro presents a lecture performance in our established series Research Wednesday
April 23, 2025, 17:00-18:30
This lecture-performance entails Common Ground, an experience of commonality under the geological timeframe. The lecture-performance expands discussions from that time to its audience members in attempts to learn from and to address the needs and the limits of environmental reparation under the catastrophic. Join us!
Forschungsapero 2025: Anna Huber discusses performance and dance conservation with Hanna Hölling und Emilie Magnin
March 19, 2025, 18:00-21:00
During this year’s annual showcase of HKB research, the so-called “Forschungsapero,” artist, dancer and choreographer Anna Huber discusses performance conservation with Hanna B. Hölling and Emilie Magnin at Schlachthaus Theater, Rathausgasse 20, 3011 Bern. You are warmly invited!
BOOK LUNCH OF OUR SECOND VOLUME! Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care
March 13, 2024, 17:00-18:30
Newly published from Routledge, and available in hardcover and Open Access, this second volume of our anthology concludes the four-year research project Performance and offers critical insights into the conservation and care of performance as a living practice. The event will feature presentations by several contributing authors and an introduction by the book’s editors.
Hanna B. Hölling: “Once Upon Time:” Storytelling as Experience in Florence Jung’s Performative Conceptualism
November 8, 2024, 14:40
Project lead Prof. Dr. Hanna B. Hölling will discuss the work of Florence Jung at the symposium Art as Experience / Kunst as Erfahrung organized by the Swiss Institute for Art Research SIK ISEA in Zurich. The chapter related to this lecture can be accessed here.
Performance Diagrams: From Cosmology to Politics
October 2, 2024, 17:30
Our team member Dr. Andrej Mirčev examines the concept of performance diagrams and their historical, epistemic and aesthetic functions for theater and dance. This talk takes place within our established Research Wednesday series and will include a presentation of Mirčev’s book The Poetics of Performance Diagrams published this fall by Cambridge Press (2024).
Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation: Research Festival and Exhibition
September 14-29, 2024
Save the date for the grand finale of our research project, celebrated during a two-week research festival and an exhibition! Expect exciting conversations and prominent guests.
Our exhibition Yet to Come: Experiments in Reverse-engineering and Conserving Performance opens at HKB Bern!
September 14, 2024
We are excited to present the outcomes of our four-year research project in an exhibition at the Director’s Hall, Bern Academy of the Arts.
Two sessions at 36th Congress of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, June 26, 2024, Lyon
June 26, 2024
Our project team has organized and will moderate two sessions on performance conservation at the 36th Congress of the International Committee of History of Art in Lyon.
Dance’s Disturbances to the Museum’s Model of Care
June 19, 2024
In this talk, former dancer and art historian Dr. Megan Metcalf will present dance-specific challenges to central conservation concepts and procedures.
Revolving Documents: Join us for a book launch and a picnic in Basel, at the Museum Tinguely!
May 28, 2024
We cordially invite you to a book launch of the recently published anthology edited by Sabine Gebhardt Fink and Andrej Mirčev.
What does it mean to bring a performance by an unknown choreographer from the past into the future? Joanna Leśnierowska, choreographer and visual dramaturg, will share insights from her research on the Polish avant-garde choreographer Yanka Rudzka.
Book launch event: Performance: The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, vol.1
May 2, 2024
This is an online presentation of the first anthology resulting from our project. Join us for exciting presentations by invited authors and the editors of our new book.
Dynamic Objects Network: Perspectives on Performative Objects
April 15, 2024
Third Annual Colloquium: Performance Conservation: Artists Speak
May 16, 2023
Our colleague Jules Pelta Feldman will discuss concepts of loss and damage as they relate to performance at an online event organized by ICON.
Artists engaged with performance discussed the afterlives and legacies of their work, even considering performance’s potential to serve as a form of conservation itself.
Workshop with Rosanna Raymond: Moana Tatatau
May 17, 2023
Artist and scholar Rosanna Raymond led a workshop exploring Pacific tattoo practices through writing, drawing, embodiment, and oral history.
Book launch and panel discussion: Object-Event-Performance: Art, Materiality, and Continuity Since the 1960s
February 22, 2023
Editors Hanna B. Hölling and authors of the new volume presented their contributions.
Anna Schäffler: The Art of Preservation
December 21, 2022
Dr. Anna Schäffler discussed her research on cooperative forms of preservation in connection with the work of German conceptual artist Anna Oppermann.
Second annual colloquium – Performance Conservation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
September 30, 2022
This colloquium collected a diverse range of perspectives on the conservation of performance from art history, performance studies, artistic practice, anthropology, and beyond.
All four team members presented at this conference, which took place within the frame of the exhibition “BANG BANG: translocal hi:stories of performance art” at the Museum Tinguely.
Brandie Macdonald, Senior Director of Decolonizing Initiatives at the Museum of Us, located on Kumeyaay Nation territory in San Diego, California, discussed the preservation and transmission of living heritage in the museum context.
College Art Association Annual Conference: Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation
March 3, 2022
Four talks at the CAA panel we chaired explored different approaches to the conservation of ephemeral art.
Can Performance (Art) Be Conserved? Claire Bishop in Conversation
September 29, 2021
What does it mean to conserve performance art, to extend its lifespan into the future? Art historian and critic Claire Bishop discussed these and related questions with the PCMK team.
Living Materials: Ethics and Principles for Embodied Stewardship. A Conversation Between Cori Olinghouse and Megan Metcalf
June 10, 2021
This conversation between artist and archivist Cori Olinghouse and art historian Megan Metcalf examined embodied conservation skills, which are essential for the preservation of performance and related mediums yet remain mostly invisible and under-theorized in visual art.
This online event was the first event in a series of annual colloquia on the topic of the conservability of performance art and performance-based works. Conservators, scholars, curators, and artists contest the common-sense understanding of performance as a non-conservable form and ask questions concerning how, and to what extent, performance art and performance-based works can be conserved.
Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge 