Turba

Enter any contemporary art museum, gallery, or biennale in 2024 and chances are that the live arts will be center “stage.” While theater, dance, music, and performance art were historically presented in visual arts contexts as fringe or one-off events, since the turn of the twenty-first century—and gaining momentum over the past decade—there has been a growing tendency to “exhibit” live art. As choreographers, directors, and composers who have built their careers in the visual art world—which is significantly more monied than the performing arts world—take home major prizes and awards, leading museums are inaugurating spaces designed exclusively to house installation and performance. But architectural spaces are also ideological spaces with tacit value systems that influence conventions of performance and spectatorship, as well as perceptual experience. What happens when live arts are transplanted into the modernist project of the white cube, characterized as it is by its putative neutrality, objectivity, universality, disembodiment, and erasure of context (see O'Doherty [1976] 1999)? Today's eventized museum showcases works of art characterized by durationality (they are circumscribed by time), corporeality (they feature live, gesturing bodies), and relationality (they foreground the intersubjective exchange) that engender new modes of what Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) called “relational aesthetics.” In so doing, these works challenge traditional definitions of the “collection,” the “archive,” the “museum,” and even “contemporary art.”

It is an honor to receive an invitation from Tawny Andersen and Dena Davida to republish the curatorial essay for our exhibition-event, CounterPoses: Reimagining Tableaux Vivants, that was presented by the gallery Oboro in Montreal in 1998. The opportunity to revisit the project and share it with a larger audience reignites the joy, generosity, and openness we experienced within the Montreal art community. During those years, we were engaged in interdisciplinary graduate studies that illuminated our interests in sensory aesthetics, affect theory, and experiential art, while our editorial positions at Parachute magazine located us at the nexus of the critical art apparatus, where we sought to expand upon art-historical discourse by nurturing writers working in cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies. Now full-time academics, we continue to be involved in these fields of inquiry as founding editors of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, as well as through independent curatorial projects.¹

Ari Benjamin Meyers's Kunsthalle for Music is simultaneously an institution, an exhibition, a concert, a music collection, a process, and an ensemble. In this essay, I take readers on a tour of the show's first presentation, followed by reflections on questions that it posed. In particular, the project troubles the issue of art's mediums, their relation to art as a singular concept and its institutional form(s), and art's mode of cultural transmission through time. The philosopher Peter Osborne, who has written on and presented at the Kunsthalle, provides my theoretical foil alongside Theodor Adorno and Rosalind Krauss. I add musings by Jean-Luc Nancy to consider how the project exhibits liveness and its musical significance. Mediums of art are neither essences nor concepts for deconstruction, I conclude; rather, they insist and persist as modalities of action.

“Into the Gray Zone” conducts a theoretical analysis of the complex inter-mediality of the choreographic exhibition. Examining the inherent tensions that arise as live dance-based practice enters visual arts institutions, this article examines audience attention, individual and collective spectatorship, artistic labor and value, technology, and the influence of social media. It argues that the inter-medial nature of the choreographic exhibition and its porosity to online platforms and mobile communication provides a more accurate reflection of the mediated environments we are currently surrounded by, and living within, than the black box theater. How can dance-based practice be implemented in this gray zone of highly individuated and distracted attention in ways that can make our contemporary condition visible? How can it potentially, if temporarily, remediate these environments?

In this article, I examine the potentials and challenges of curating performance art inside an exhibition space for raising environmental awareness. I begin by offering a short history of environmental performance art. While early works were inspired by social ecology, more recent works are better elucidated by Greg Garrard's notion of “deep ecology” and theories of the Anthropocene. I then move on to my case study: the performance SANDKIND by Danish artist Tora Balslev that I curated at Agder Art Center in Kristiansand, Norway. I combine Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff's concept of “the curatorial” with Brad Haseman's performative methodology for practice-led research to develop my method of inquiry. I argue that the caring slowness of SANDKIND was its key feature, and that the meditative state that the slowness induced in the performer and audience created a heightened awareness of the other-than-human material of sand, thereby transforming the exhibition space into a multifaceted zone for more-than-human engagement.

This article explores the notion of “curatorial research” within the realm of the live arts through the case study of the perfor mance exhibition Klimata (2019) curated by Léna Szirmay-Kalos, Dániel Kovács, and Jasna Layes Vinovršky, at the Berliner Flutgraben. In the article, I accentuate the transdisciplinarity of the project, which constitutes a paradigmatic example of curatorial research in exhibition settings. I argue that the project underscores the transformative potential of integrating the live arts with time-based media, or installation art, while foregrounding the embodied knowledge of the vulnerable body. Additionally, these forms are combined with non-art/scientific forms, enriching the transdisciplinary dialogue and expanding the boundaries of curatorial knowledge production. This investigation contributes to the progress of curatorial studies by providing insights into the dynamic intersection between curation and research.

Museum artifacts can be imagined as “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010).¹ Indeed, it could be argued that one function of museums and exhibitions may well be to create circumstances that let us experience material objects as inspiring, vital, and “vibrant”—a term that incidentally links all matter to those vibrations of air molecules that we call “sound.” But what is it that makes objects vibrant?

Maipelo (she/her), a Botswana-born and South African-trained embodied practitioner currently serves as a doctoral researcher at Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH), under the guidance of her primary supervisor, John-Paul Zaccarini (he/him). Zaccarini holds the position of Professor of Performing Arts for Bodily and Vocal Practices and directs FutureBrownSpace (FBS), an enclave conceived for individuals from the global majority navigating predominantly White fields and institutions.

Folkerts, Hendrik & Julia Born, eds. Alexandra Bachzetsis: Show Time Book / Book Time Show. Amsterdam: Roma Publications.

Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969. Exhibition and performances at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, June 24 to November 26, 2023. Curated by Candice Hopkins, with curatorial research led by Amelia Russo.