Gabriele Brandstetter: "The Museum in Transition - How Do Performing Artists Affect Historiography?"
Gabriele Brandstetter, Professor of Theatre and Dance Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
Over the past years a growing number of dance performances has been exhibited in museums. Curators and choreographers thus challenge the institution of the museum and traditional modes of (re-)presenting visual arts; and as well they produce transitions between time-frames and space of theatre and museum. How do performance practises - like Tino Sehgals choreographing "situations", or Boris Charmatz' "Musée de la danse" - reconfigure concepts of collection and exhibition, of archival documentation and performance of re-enactments? The lecture will examine performances that are situated between the frames of theatre and museum/ installation, like Mette Ingvartsen's "69 positions", and ask if and how performative modes of re-doing the past are affecting the narratives and discourse of historiography. How could we (re-)think the politics of the "re-", - expressed in the practises and terminology of re-production, re-construction, re-working etc. - in terms of theory and practises of historiography?