Conference

Different narrations of the beginnings of Performance Art, a translocal movement, is the focus of the Scientific Exchange Conference: Revolving Documents #1. Leading international scholars and artists will investigate the strategies with which museums, galleries, but also historians and artists have reconstructed and represented, the beginnings of this field of art and activism. Further we will address collaborative strategies and networking labour. And finally, we discuss different methodologies for researching the beginnings of Performance Art today.

Programm (PDF)

Panel I: What Beginnings?
– Welcome Day 1: Christian Ritter, Sabine Gebhardt-Fink
– Dror Harari: Competing Historiographies: The Marginalization of 1970s – Israeli Action and Performance Art
– Claudia Madeira, Fernando Matos de Oliveira: From (proto)performance to reenactment – Similarity and Anachronism in (Portuguese) Performance Art History
– Andrea Bátorová: Mapping the dimensions of asymmetric performance art histories: investigating Velvet Revolution as turning point for formation and framing of narratives of performance art in former Czechoslovakia
– Andrej Mirčev: Transgenerational Pathos Formula of Performance Art in Yugoslavia
– Katalin Cseh Varga, Kornélia Deres: Narrative Turns in Central European Performance Art History
– Stephen Greer: From the miraculous to the radical: towards a methodology for researching live art and performance art in Scotland

Panel II: Who’s Narrations?
– Heike Roms: To Begin at the Already Begun? Narrating Wales’s “first” Happening (1965)
Andrea Saemann, Chris Regn, Muda Mathis: The Revolving Performance Project
Dorothee Richter: Fluxus Narrations – Yoko Ono as example
Séverine Fromaigeat: Making room for different bodies and subversive actions – Is
performance art a tool for emancipation?
– Dorothea Rust: criss-crossed performance – as a lecture as a performance as a lecture

Panel III: Which research methodologies?
– Welcome Day 2: Sabine Gebhardt-Fink
– Sabine Gebhardt: Revolving performance: communicative memory as a category to research performance art
– Hanna Barbara Hölling and her Team: Prof. Valerian Maly, Dr. Jules Pelta Feldman, Emilie Magnin: What is Performance? Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge
– Oriana Fox: Full Disclosure: self-exposure as feminist performance art practice and research methodology


– Group Discussion 1 / Panel III
– Sandra Sykora: Performance Art: The Legal Perspective
– Tancredi Gusman: Unfolding Documents
Sibylle Omlin: Oral history and Performance Art
– Group Discussion 2 / Panel III
– Students Contribution: Elena Maspoli: Third Space
– Students Contribution: Bettina Mürner: The painter is present

Introduction to and Visit of the Exhibition and Presentation of Regionales Videoprogramm Zentralschweiz by Judith Huber, Margarit von Büren