Yet To Come: Experiments in Reverse-Engineering and Conserving Performance is an exhibition about a performance that has not happened yet. Not unlike a conventional display of performative works, it involves moving images, photographs, objects, scores and documentation as well as alternative means of keeping performances alive.
The exhibition reverse-engineers performance, starting, anachronically, from what the event will have generated. Here, the performance event has not occurred, and yet its “material” has already arrived. The exhibition thus experimentally questions the perceived linearity of time—a past followed by a present and a future—disrupting the ontology of causality and effect. Performance lingers in the intervals among these material forms, in the “future perfect” of potential scenarios, in the disruptive a priori of conservation.
Conservation is actively acting upon, rather than reacting to, an object in its care (pro-action as opposed to re-action). The inscription of conservation’s interventions, which commonly take place on a deteriorated work, is here prescriptive and creative. In such an arena, where “knots knot knots” and “thoughts think thoughts” (Donna Haraway),
what answers are we finding to the questions that have not been posed yet?
The exhibition envisions experimental technologies of care. Just as inpainting is an aesthetic technology that employs one of a painting’s media, we propose to transpose certain mediatic aspects of performance into the modes of its capture and documentation. A LEGO model, Polaroid photography, chance poetry and AI are implemented as free-hand visual, sculptural and textual inscriptions of the event. A flipbook notates movement, being itself, and not entirely unlike film, a form of a moving image. Resembling a mix of camera obscura, archaic telescope and a theatre box, the tube peers into a deep vision of the event that will have taken place.
Trying to do more with less in these precarious times, the exhibition employs an economy of means by drawing on the surrounding environment. It finds, curates and performs existing things rather than creates them anew. Importantly, it proposes a radical rethinking of contemporary conservation, unlearning the habitual directionality of “securing the past for the future” and overcoming the tyranny of short-term thinking. This is a deep-time conservation that establishes long-term relations and listens to the multidirectional ongoingness of things in the extended present.
The archival part of the exhibition invites the viewer to browse through the rich archive of the research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge: interviews, conversations, a questionnaire, and its website.
This exhibition is a part of the research festival “Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation” organized by Hanna B. Hölling, Andrej Mirčev, Joanna Leśnierowska, Charles Wrapner and Emilie Magnin within the research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge (SNSF 2020-24).
Open Monday through Friday, 10 AM-6 PM and on Saturdays and Saturdays 1 PM – 5 PM at the HKB Bern Academy of the Arts, Fellerstrasse 11, Directors Hall, directly accessible via the main entrance next to Buffet Nord.
Exhibition handout in English and German.
Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge 