YET TO COME: EXPERIMENTS IN REVERSE-ENGINEERING AND CONSERVING PERFORMANCE – AN EXHIBITION
HKB | Bern University of the Arts, Directors Hall, Fellerstrasse 11, Bern
September 14-29, 2024
Yet To Come: Experiments in Reverse-Engineering and Conserving Performance is an exhibition about a performance that has not happened yet. Not unlike a conventional display of performative works, it involves moving images, photographs, objects, scores and documentation as well as alternative means of keeping performances alive.
The exhibition reverse-engineers performance, starting, anachronically, from what the event will have generated. Here, the performance event has not occurred, and yet its “material” has already arrived. The exhibition thus experimentally questions the perceived linearity of time—a past followed by a present and a future—disrupting the ontology of causality and effect. Performance lingers in the intervals among these material forms, in the “future perfect” of potential scenarios, in the disruptive a priori of conservation.
Conservation is actively acting upon, rather than reacting to, an object in its care (pro-action as opposed to re-action). The inscription of conservation’s interventions, which commonly take place on a deteriorated work, is here prescriptive and creative. In such an arena, where “knots knot knots” and “thoughts think thoughts” (Donna Haraway), what answers are we finding to the questions that have not been posed yet?
The exhibition envisions experimental technologies of care. Just as inpainting is an aesthetic technology that employs one of a painting’s media, we propose to transpose certain mediatic aspects of performance into the modes of its capture and documentation. A LEGO model, Polaroid photography, chance poetry and AI are implemented as free-hand visual, sculptural and textual inscriptions of the event. A flipbook notates movement, being itself, and not entirely unlike film, a form of a moving image. Resembling a mix of camera obscura, archaic telescope and a theatre box, the tube peers into a deep vision of the event that will have taken place.
Trying to do more with less in these precarious times, the exhibition employs an economy of means by drawing on the surrounding environment. It finds, curates and performs existing things rather than creates them anew. Importantly, it proposes a radical rethinking of contemporary conservation, unlearning the habitual directionality of “securing the past for the future” and overcoming the tyranny of short-term thinking. This is a deep-time conservation that establishes long-term relations and listens to the multidirectional ongoingness of things in the extended present.
The archival part of the exhibition invites the viewer to browse through the rich archive of the research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge: interviews, conversations, a questionnaire, and its website.
This exhibition is a part of the research festival “Conserving Performance, Performing Conservation” organized by Hanna B. Hölling, Andrej Mirčev, Joanna Leśnierowska, Charles Wrapner and Emilie Magnin within the research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality, Knowledge (SNSF 2020-24).
Open Monday through Friday, 10 AM-6 PM and on Saturdays and Saturdays 1 PM – 5 PM at the HKB Bern Academy of the Arts, Fellerstrasse 11, Directors Hall, directly accessible via the main entrance next to Buffet Nord.
REVISIONS: ZEN FOR FILM – AN EXHIBITION AT BARD
Bard Graduate Center Gallery, New York
September 18, 2015–January 10, 2016 – extended through February 21, 2016.
How do works of art endure over time in the face of aging materials and changing interpretations of their meaning? How do decay, technological obsolescence, and the blending of old and new media affect what an artwork is and can become? And how can changeable artworks encourage us to rethink our assumptions of a work of art as fixed and static? Revisions—Zen for Film, on view this fall and winter in the Bard Graduate Center Focus Gallery, explores these questions through Zen for Film, one of the most evocative artworks by the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik (1932- 2006). Created during the early 1960s, Zen for Film consists of the screening of blank film leader for several minutes. As the film ages and wears in the projector, the viewer is confronted with a constantly evolving work. Revisions—Zen for Film provides a fresh perspective on an artwork with a rich history of display by asking precisely what, how, and when is Zen for Film?
Developed during my two-year Andrew W. Mellon “Cultures of Conservation” Fellowship at Bard Graduate Center, Revisions—Zen for Film offers a unique and intimately focused encounter with the materiality of Paik’s work. It is an interplay of three parts: the experience of Zen for Film’s projection in the Focus Gallery; a publication of the same name published by the University of Chicago Press that provides conceptual, aesthetic, philosophical, and historic contexts for Zen for Film.
The digital interactive with contributions by BGC master’s students (co-developed by Linked by Air) frames Zen for Film through conceptual associations that correspond to viewers’ experiences of it—boredom, chance, materiality, nothingness, silence, time, and trace. Through these concepts, Zen for Film is linked with a number of artworks that can be viewed as potential inspirations, antecedents, or contemporaries. Together these suggest issues of appropriation and continual reinterpretation. Included in the digital interactive are artworks by Cory Arcangel, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, John Cage, Com&Com, Tony Conrad, Merce Cunningham, Guy Debord, Marcel Duchamp, Ceal Floyer, Ken Friedman, JODI, Yves Klein, Imi Knoebel, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, Peter Kubelka, Kazimir Malevich, Christian Marclay, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray, Robert Ryman, Paul Sharits, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Mungo Thompson, Michel Verjux, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner.
Visit bgc.bard.edu/revisions for more information on the exhibition and accompanying publication, to access the interactive, and to find out about related public programs, group tours, and the symposium, Revisions: Object—Event—Performance—Process since the 1960s (September 21, 2015, 11:15am-6pm).
Selected papers from the symposium, along with chapters by invited authors, have been published in an anthology Object-Event-Performance: Art, Materiality and Continuity since the 1960s (ed. Hanna B. Hölling)
LINKS:
Exhibition website
Digital interactive
Purchase the catalog
Review in Artforum
Press release
Revision on Voices in Contemporary Art
Purchase Object-Event-Performance: Art, Materiality and Continuity since the 1960s
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