We are proud to present the final book in the Performing Urgency series by the House on Fire network: Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy edited by Florian Malzacher & Joanna Warsza. Performing Urgency is a publication series on the relationship between theatre and politics.
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.
We will start with a short lecture on the concept of performative curating by Florian Malzacher, followed by a conversation between Florian, curator and writer Anne Szefer Karlsen and Stéphane Boitel, curator at Théâtre Garonne. Moderator is Gulli Kr. Sekse.
Florian Malzacher is an independent performing arts curator, dramaturge and writer. 2013 - 2017 he was artistic director of Impulse Theater Festival (Cologne, Dusseldorf and Mulheim/Ruhr in Germany) and 2006 - 2012 co-programmer of the multidisciplinary arts festival steirischer herbst in Graz (A). After graduating at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen he worked till 2005 mainly as a freelance theatre journalist for daily newspapers and has continued since then to contribute regularly to international magazines like Theater Heute (DE), Tanz (DE), Frakcija (HR), Didaskalia (PL) and Camera Austria (AT) etc.
Anne Szefer Karlsen is a curator, writer and editor with a strong interest in artistic and curatorial collaborations as well as developing the language that surrounds art productions of today, linguistically, spatially and structurally. Szefer Karlsen is teaching and lecturing in formal and informal education, and is currently Associate Professor for MA Curatorial Practice at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen (former Bergen Academy of Art and Design) (2015–21).
Stéphane Boitel is a curator for Théâtre Garonne in Toulouse (FR), where he is especially in charge of the development of the international artistic policy. Trained in linguistics and literature at Toulouse Jean-Jaures University in the 90's, he founds and directs in the meantime an independent cultural magazine. After several years as a freelance writer and publisher in the publishing industry, he is recruited by the Théâtre Garonne in the early 2000's. While in charge at Garonne, he works in parallel as a freelancer for various theatres and festivals in France and abroad. Since 2106, he is also a lecturer at Champollion University / Albi (Strategy for international cultural relations).
More about Performing Urgency #4 Empty Stages, Crowded Flats. Performativity as Curatorial Strategy
During its impressive career over the last decades the term ‘performative’ has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats 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. The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and other cultural utterances, but it also emphasises the often dismissed, colloquial notion of the performative as something being ‘theatre-like’, believing that those two strands are in fact interdependent and intertwined.
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 Tacons, Kasia Tórz, Rachida Triki, Jelena Vesić, Joanna Warsza, Catherine Wood.
The book can be purchased in our pop-up book shop or in the Box Office
Publisher: Alexander Verlag Berlin www.alexander-verlag.com
Co-publisher: Live Art Development Agency www.thisisunbound.co.uk
