Curating Performance: A Map Drawn to the Scale of the Territory Itself

THIS SYMPOSIUM HAS BEEN POSTPONED. PLEASE CHECK BACK FOR UPDATES!

the 5th Annual Performance Studies Curatorial Symposium with Nana Adusei Poku, Hendrik Folkerts, Noémie Solomon, Diya Vij, & others to be announced.

For more and updated information about this event, please visit here.

It is well known that performances are situated temporally and performance art is often referred to as a time-based medium. However, efforts to curate performance remind us that this heightened sense of time is an expression of the space with which it’s entangled. The image of a map above, borrowed from Guy Debord, describes the alienations of capitalist spectacle, but also points to the spatial politics that performance can enact. Performance-based art practices tend to propose different uses of space than conventional exhibitions or stage-based work. Attending to this difference raises questions about how publics are constituted, the limits of infrastructure, uses of land and its resources, and how works of art contribute to territorializing, deterritorializing, and re-territorializing projects. If performances may test regimes of authority, confound developmental agendas, and confront historical questions of coloniality, this 5^th annual curatorial symposium asks, borrowing a term from Denise Ferreira da Silva, what are the “poethics” of taking up space with performance?

Organized by the Department of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch with collaboration and sponsorship from Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance, Wesleyan University; and NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.