Performance: Four Perspectives - A panel by/with Hanna B. Hölling, Jules Pelta Feldman, Emilie Magnin and Valerian Maly

On June 9-10, the symposium “Revolving Documents #1: Narrations of the Beginnings of Performance Art” took place at the Museum Tinguely in Basel. All four members of the research team – Hanna Hölling, Valerian Maly, Jules Pelta Feldman, and Emilie Magnin – presented their research. The symposium was organized by Sabine Gebhardt Fink and Elisabeth Noldschwartz of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, in collaboration with the exhibition “BANG BANG – translocal hi:stories of performance art” (8 June – 21 August 2022) and the Museum Tinguely.

Project lead Hanna B. Hölling introduced the conservation of performance as a reorganizational act which prompts practical and philosophical reorientations. Project specialist Valerian Maly considered the necessary conditions for performing Untitled (GLASSTERN), a demanding and site-sensitive work which he premiered in 2000 in collaboration with Klara Schillinger. Postdoctoral fellow Jules Pelta Feldman discussed the notion of ritual as a framework for reconsidering both the history of performance and its endurance. Doctoral candidate Emilie Magnin gave insight into conservation documentation methods and their role in the institutionalization of performance. Together, these presentations built a fresh concept of performance’s past, present, and future, and challenge the limits of conservation as material-oriented practice.