During its impressive career over the last decades the term ‘performative’ has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, and economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused.
Empty Stages, Crowded Flats investigates an array of staged situations, from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums,theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects, and asks how ‘theatre-like’ strategies and techniques can in fact enable ‘reality making’ situations in art, and how, as a consequence, curating itself becomes staged, dramatised, choreographed, and composed.
With contributions by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Knut Ove Arntzen, Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi, Claire Bishop, Beatrice von Bismarck, Rui Catalão, Vanessa Desclaux, Tim Etchells, Galerie, Karin Harrasser, Shannon Jackson, Ana Janevski, Lina Majdalanie, Ewa Majewska, Florian Malzacher, Maayan Sheleff, Gerald Siegmund, Claire Tancons, Kasia Tórz, Rachida Triki, Jelena Vesić, Joanna Warsza & Catherine Wood.
A rewarding compendium that revisits groundbreaking formats of the past decades. Theater Heute