The video series brings together eleven 15-minutes lectures as part of the research project "Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art". The research project is based at the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2020 "Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective" at Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. The speakers Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Irene Campolmi, Stephanie Comilang, Anna Ehrenstein, Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, Christian Falsnaes, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Ho Tzu Nyen, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Grace Samboh and Stefanie Wuschitz address subjects regarding the relation between performance and communities along individual case studies from their own practice or research. Team: Anna-Catharina Gebbers and Dr. Anna-Lena Werner, Assistance: Liselotte Schinzing // -> Accessible via temporal-communities.de and the playlist on YouTube
"A Video Series on Performance and Communities" brings together eleven 15-minute presentations by international artists, scholars and curators, investigating how performative practices embody histories, transfer embodied knowledge, and establish communities in acts of collecting, archiving and presenting performance art in exhibitions and outreach programs. The lectures offer insights into the processes of appropriation and transformation that inform ideas, attitudes and objects, but also discuss how (constructs of) communities are created in the first place.
Alongside individual case studies from their own practice or research, speakers Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro, Irene Campolmi, Stephanie Comilang, Anna Ehrenstein, Rosalia Namsai Engchuan, Christian Falsnaes, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Ho Tzu Nyen, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Grace Samboh and Stefanie Wuschitz address a wide range of subjects, including investigations into communities of pleasure within peripheral networks (Ehrenstein), into issues of solidarity and invisibility among displaced communities of refugees (Nguyen), into oppressed feminist maker cultures (Wuschitz), and into the legacy of colonial and dictatorship architectures today (Comilang). Other presentations highlight the necessity for critical radical mutation and ecologies of darkness in preparing visions for working with communities (Mba Bikoro), critically address the rituals of power dynamics and collective actions (Falsnaes), or meditate on the delusion of objectivity and propose collective practices rooted in a radical recognition of togetherness (Engchuan), or ask whether it is possible to embody other people’s struggles (Samboh). In a reflection on the global pandemic, the lectures also include case studies on how local lockdowns have imprisoned communities (Nyen) and share reflections on performances as open-ended rituals and as durational gestures (Campolmi). In her introduction to the collaboration between Hamburger Bahnhof and the Cluster of Excellence, Gebbers’ video lecture addresses the regulatory and spectacle power of discursive performance.
"A Video Series on Performance and Communities" is part of the Transfer Project "Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art", which explores how diverse histories inform performative practices and shape communities as embodied knowledge. In collaboration with Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, the project accompanies the museum's exhibition "Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories" (curated by Gridthiya Gaweewong, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Grace Samboh, June Yap, initiated by the Goethe-Institut), which will open in 2021. The project primarily focuses on the intersections between Southeast Asian and so-called 'Western' performative practices, while addressing the blind spots in traditional historiography in 'the West', as well as the consequences of colonialism and relationships capable of advancing the deconstruction of the 'Western' canon. Conceiving the global cultural institutions of the future involves addressing the questions of how traces of history – embodied both in actual bodies and in artifacts in museum collections and archives – can be made visible, and how forms of memory can be both preserved and treated respectfully.
Organisation: Dr. Anna-Lena Werner
Program: Anna-Catharina Gebbers & Dr. Anna-Lena Werner
Assistance: Lieselotte Schinzing
Video Design: Studio PanDan
EXC 2020 Temporal Communities, Freie Universität Berlin
Research Area 2: Travelling Matters
Project: "Circulating Narratives – Entangling Communities: Case Studies in Global Performance Art"