PERFORMANCE: THE ETHICS AND THE POLITICS OF CARE
1. Mapping the Field
May 29–30, 2021
SPEAKERS
Click here to learn more about the colloquium organizers.
Erin Brannigan is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at the University of New South Wales and works as a writer, academic and curator. Erin’s academic publications include Moving Across Disciplines: Dance in the Twenty-First Century (Sydney: Currency House, 2010), Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers, co-edited with Virginia Baxter (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2014). She has published articles in journals such as Senses of Cinema, Writings on Dance, Brolga, Dance Research Journal, Performance Paradigm, Performance Philosophy, Broadsheet, Runway and International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, alongside several book chapters. Her monographs-in-progress are Choreography, Art and Experimental Composition 1950s -1970s and The Persistence of Dance: The Conceptual and Material in Contemporary Art and Choreography. Other projects are New Paradigms for Performance Pedagogies (UNSW T&L Grant with Dr. Bryoni Trezise) and Dancing Sydney : Mapping Movement : Performing Histories (an archival project with Dr. Julie-Anne Long and Dr. Amanda Card).
Barbara Büscher is professor of media studies/intermediality at Leipzig Academy of Music and Theatre. She has published numerous essays on post-dramatic live art, performance theory and media art, art and technology, and performance art and architecture. Since 2010 her research has focused on questions of historiography of performance and media art and on performance/performing archives. In collaboration with Dr. Franz Anton Cramer (University of the Arts Berlin) she headed the research project “Records and Representations. Media and Constitutive Systems in Archiving Performance-based Arts” from 2012 to 2017. Since 2017 she has been directing, together with Prof. Dr. Annette Menting, the research project “Architecture and Space for the Performing Arts – Developments since the 1960s: A Transdisciplinary Research Project between Theater/Media Studies and the History and Theory of Architecture” (funded by DFG). She is a co-publisher of the online journal MAP – media/archive/performance (www.perfomap.de). Barbara Büscher/ Franz Anton Cramer (eds.). Fluid Access. Media, Performance, Archive. Hildesheim/ New York 2017.
Frieder Butzmann is a composer, musician, radio play author, performance artist and as such a legendary “Crachmacheur” and belongs to the illustrious circle of Berlin’s “Geniale Dilletanten.” Frieder Butzmann collects sounds, music, noises, impressions, but usually doesn’t know whether to turn them into pieces of music, film music, lectures, radio plays or entire operas. He tirelessly spreads, shortens, transposes analogue and digital sound recordings beyond recognition and presents himself to an astonished audience whenever they like.
Brian Castriota is an art historian and conservator specialised in the conservation of time-based media, contemporary art, and archaeological materials. He completed graduate-level training in conservation at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts (2014) and received a PhD in History of Art from the University of Glasgow (2019). Since 2018 he has been working as a freelance conservator for time-based media and contemporary art at the National Galleries Scotland and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Prior to his doctoral studies he was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Time-Based Media Conservation at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and worked as a contract conservator for time-based media artworks at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. He is lecturer on time-based media conservation at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and guest lectures on the subject of contemporary art conservation theory and practice at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh College of Art.
Gabriella Giannachi is Professor in Performance and New Media and Director of the Centre for Intermedia and Creative Technology at the University of Exeter. Her most recent book publications include: Virtual Theatres (Routledge: 2004); Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts, ed. with Nigel Stewart (Peter Lang: 2005); The Politics of New Media Theatre (Routledge: 2007); Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated, co-authored with Nick Kaye (MUP 2011); Performing Mixed Reality, co-authored with Steve Benford (MIT Press 2011); Archaeologies of Presence, co-edited with Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks (Routledge, 2012); Archive Everything (MIT 2016) and Histories of Performance Documentation, co-edited with Jonah Westerman (Routledge, 2017). She has collaborated with museums in the fields of new media and performance documentation (e.g. Tate and LiMA) while also developing novel platforms for the sharing of collections in collaboration with computer scientists at University of Nottingham, Tate and Royal Albert Museum and Art Gallery. Her research has been funded by EPSRC, AHRC, EU, Innovate UK and the National Heritage Lottery Fund. She is currently completing a book illustrating how technologies used for performative self-portraiture have changed our understanding of what we mean by self and working with Annet Dekker on editing a study of the documentation of digital art (forthcoming 2022, Routledge).
Iona Goldie-Scot is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Her research has its foundations within the research program ‘New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art’ (NACCA) – a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network established to resolve fundamental questions concerning the identity, values and authenticity of modern and contemporary artworks and the consequences for their conservation as well as rethinking historically grown professional distinctions such as those between the curator and the conservator. Iona’s research interests specifically lie in the institutional changes occurring in museums in light of the increasing acquisition of performance-based artworks, the shifting nature of custodian responsibility, and the efficacy of varying methods of documentation in the preservation of performance artworks. Prior to her doctoral studies she received a Distinction in her MA from Sotheby’s Institute of Art and was awarded a First-Class Master’s degree from the University of St Andrews.
Lizzie Gorfaine is a producer and the Assistant Director and Producer of Performance and Live Programs at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She oversees all aspects of performance production, live work, and interactive projects in the exhibition and collection program at the Museum. Projects include work by Yvonne Rainer, Maria Hassabi, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Pope.L, Andrea Fraser, Allora & Calzadilla, Simone Forti, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Yoko Ono, and Kraftwerk.
Gisela Hochuli is a performance artist who lives in Switzerland (Bern and Ruppoldsried). She studied economics and sociology at the University of Bern (1989-1996) and fine arts at the Zurich University of the Arts (2001-2005). Since 2002 she has been showing her solo performances in museums, galleries, and at national and international performance festivals in Asia, South and North America, Northern Africa and Europe. She also works in collaborations with various (inter)national artists. She organizes performance events, teaches performance art, and interviews performance artists. In 2014 she won the Swiss Performance Art Award. She is a member of the Performance Art Network CH (PANCH). Gisela Hochuli likes to work with what is at hand – with the obvious. This can include her own body, the space, the audience, as well as site-specific materials and contexts. She is interested in the investigation of an object, in the focus on something, in objects as partners, in simplicity and its diversity, in the culture of everyday life, in when the unusual becomes visible, in transformations and in the subversive view behind things.
Ana Janevski is Curator in the Department of Media and Performance of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has been in charge of the Performance program and has collaborated with many choreographers and artists. Sheco-curated the first museum show of Judson Dance Theater together with Thomas J Lax and Martha Joseph. She is the editor of a MoMA Dance Series book on Boris Charmatz and co-editor of Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe. She co-edited with Cosmin Costinas a publication Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive?: The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions.
Martha Joseph is Assistant Curator in the Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art. She is part of the curatorial team for The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, MoMA’s new space dedicated to performance and time-based art. She has co-curated exhibitions and performances including David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics Inc.: Rainforest V (variation 1); Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done; and Tania Bruguera: Untitled (Havana, 2000).
Pip Laurenson has over twenty years of experience in the conservation of contemporary art, establishing and leading Tate’s pioneering Time-based Media Conservation section from 1996 until 2010. In 2010 Pip took up her current role, as Head of Collection Care Research to develop, lead and support research related to the conservation and management of Tate’s collections. In championing the role of research practitioners as central to the definition of the museum as a research organisation, Pip is committed to interdisciplinary research that serves and responds to art of our time and the challenges facing the 21st century art museum. In January 2016 Pip also took up a special chair as Professor of Art Collection and Care at Maastricht University. Pip has secured awards for research from a range of funders including private foundations, the European Union framework programme and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and she currently leads the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum. She received her doctorate from University College London, is an accredited member of the Institute for Conservation and is a member of the Steering Committee of the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA).
Louise Lawson is the conservation manager of time-based media conservation at Tate. She is responsible for the strategic direction, development and delivery of all aspects relating to time-based media conservation at Tate. This requires working across a wide range of projects and programmes: exhibitions, displays, acquisition, loan-outs and collection care initiatives. She has been developing how performance artworks in Tate’s permanent collection are documented and conserved, through the project ‘Documentation and Conservation of Performance at Tate 2016-2021. Louise has shared the knowledge developed through this project via lectures and presentations, including academic publications such as; Developing a Strategy for the Conservation of Performance Works at Tate (Lawson, Finbow and Marçal ICON, 2019) and Unfolding Interactions in the Preservation of Performance Art at Tate (Lawson and Marçal ICOM-CC 2021). She has also been part of the project team for ‘Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum (2018-2021)’, with a focus on two case studies; one focusing on Tony Conrad and the second focusing on Replication.Her work is now expanding to consider choreographic artworks as Tate begins to collect and consider such artworks.
Sooyoung Leam is a South Korean curator and researcher. She is a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Her research focuses on the making and unmaking of sculpture in Contemporary Korean art through the works and writings of artist Lee Seung-taek. Her current curatorial projects include Between the Seen and the Spoken, organized by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation in commemoration of May 18 Gwangju uprising. She has been involved in the curation of various multidisciplinary exhibitions in Shanghai, London, and Seoul. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Korean art, the relationship between sculpture and performance, and the de-colonization of the archive. She holds her BA in History of Art from Cambridge University and MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and has contributed to a number of important catalogues and academic journals exploring themes such as public monuments and memory and contemporary Korean art within the geo-political and cultural context of East Asia.
Kate Lewis is a Media Conservator and the Agnes Gund Chief Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has worked with artists including David Lamelas, Suzanne Lacy, Nalini Malani, Cildo Miereles, Tony Ourlser and Lis Rhodes. She leads a five-year initiative funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address the long-term preservation of media-based works through collaborative professional training, and serves on the Board of Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA).
Rachel Mader is an art researcher. Since 2012 she has directed the competence centre Art in Public Spheres at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art. She is responsible both for a number of practice-based research projects on topics like self-organised art spaces, participatory art and city planning, as well as for basic research in the area of artistic research (special focus on the performative research paradigm) and on issues such as art and politics. Rachel Mader is co-president of SARN (Swiss Artistic Research Network), an expert in the Commission of Art in the Public Sphere, Bern (KiöR, since 2014).
Hélia Marçal is a lecturer, researcher, and conservator based in London. She was appointed Lecturer in Art, Materials, and Technology at University College London’s Department of History of Art in 2020. Before this appointment, she worked as a Fellow in Contemporary Art Conservation and Research of the Andrew W. Mellon funded research project “Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum: at Tate and a Science Manager at the Institute of Contemporary History (Universidade Nova de Lisboa). She has been the Coordinator of the Working Group on Theory, History, and Ethics of Conservation of the International Council of Museums’s Committee for Conservation since 2016. She holds a European Doctorate (PhD) from Nova University of Lisbon (2018). She has published various articles and book chapters on conservation theory and ethics, conservation of time-based media and performance art, embodied memories and the body-archive, and participation and stewardship of cultural heritage.
Siri Peyer is an art theorist and curator. Since 2015 she has been a research associate at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Bevor Collecting the Ephemeral, she has been working for the SNSF research project What Can Art Do? (2014–2019). Before that she completed the specialized master’s degree in Research on the Arts at the University of Bern (2015) and a Master of Advanced Studies in Curating from the Zurich University of the Arts (2008). She is currently working on her doctorate in cultural theory at the HafenCity University Hamburg.
Ana Ribeiro is a conservator at Tate where she works in the time-based media conservation department on acquiring new artworks onto the collection. Ana studied conservation and restoration in Lisbon (Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and her MA thesis was about issues in the presentation of time-based media works. Subsequently, Ana trained in media art conservation at the S.M.A.K., NiMK (now LiMA), and at Tate. Some of her research interests include documentation as a conservation tool and performance art preservation.
Rebecca Schneider is Professor of Modern Media and Culture at Brown University in Providence, RI, USA. She is the author of The Explicit Body in Performance (1997), Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (2011), Theatre And History (2014), and Remain, co-written with Jussi Parikka (2019). She has edited several collections, including special issues of TDR: The Drama Review on “Performance and New Materialism,” “Precarity and Performance,” and “Performance and Social Reproduction.” Over fifty other essays appear in journals and anthologies internationally and her work has been translated into multiple languages. Recently, her essay “That the Past May Yet Have Another Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up,” Theatre Journal in 2018, received the Oscar Brockett Best Essay Award with the American Society for Theatre Research. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and she has served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University in London and as a Mercator Fellow at Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 2021. She is currently working on two projects, a digital book on gesture and a project titled “Shoaling in the Sea of History,” taking up media, performance, history, and the oceanic.
Farris Wahbeh, Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources, Whitney Museum of American Art, works within the field of cultural informatics to enhance access to art and archival collections. At the Whitney, he oversees the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, the Permanent Collection Documentation Office, which maintains the cataloguing and content standards relating to works of art in the Whitney’s permanent collection, as well as Visual Resources. Mr. Wahbeh also spearheads, along with the Conservation Department, the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI), a focused project on the digital preservation and archival documentation of time-based media works of art. Mr. Wahbeh has gained experience from a wide range of institutions, including Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Creative Audio Archive, and Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.
Claire Walsh is Assistant Curator: Collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Prior to this she was Curatorial Assistant at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and Guest co-editor at MAP Magazine. Recent curatorial projects include IMMA Collection: Ghosts From the Recent Past; Archive 1990s – From Edge to Centre, and IMMA’s upcoming 30th Anniversary exhibition showcasing newly acquired performance works as part of a museum-wide presentation of the Collection. She received her BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design (2011) and MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Edinburgh College of Art (University of Edinburgh) (2013).
Karolina Wilczyńska graduated in Art History from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (UAM) and completed the Erasmus Programme at The History of Art Department at the University College London (UCL). She is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art History at the Adam Mickiewicz University. The subject of her PhD research is the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the years 1969-2021. It is a part of a broader research program aimed at a critical revision of socially engaged art, its methodology as well as its history – especially during a time of the neoliberal transition from Fordism to Postfordism. In this area she has published articles and presented papers at conferences both home and abroad. She contributed a chapter “Haft Okupacyjny vs. craftywizm” to the book “Polish Women, Patriots, Rebels” devoted to the situation and problems faced by Polish women in a public space. In 2018 she supported the work of „The Legacy of Piotr Piotrowski” and she helped in organization of the East-Central European Art Forum. In academic year 2019/2020 she taught course Art and Social Engagement at Adam Mickiewicz University. In 2019 she received the Research Grant at the J.F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universitat in Berlin. She is this year’s Fulbright scholarship holder (Fulbright Junior Research Award).
Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge 