Pictured: Maja Delak, What if. Photo: Nada Žgank.
On Thursday, 18 September 2014 (6 pm) Bojana Kunst will give the sixth and last lecture in the performance art series called Points of Convergence. Performance and Contemporaneity held by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in association with André Lepecki, performance studies professor at New York University.
Professor Kunst will examine one of the pivotal issues through which the political aspect of the performance can be discussed, the notion of time. Troubles with temporality arise from the paradoxical interlacing of precarious, fleeting and immanent temporal dimension of the performance on one side and reified, repetitive and reproduced temporal aspect of the performance on the other. This does not only have consequences for the ontology of performance, but it is also strongly related to the articulation of the political force of performance. The politics of the performance can be namely approached as the conscious politicization of its manifold temporality: how the performance is offering itself as a series of temporal resonances, echoes, delays, continuations, abandonments, temporal disarrays, discoveries and ruptures.
From this perspective Professor Kunst will address some aspects related to the performance practice from so called ?Eastern Europe? and speak about some troubles with temporality which arise through the discursive and historical capture of singular practices.
Bojana Kunst: Professor in the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies / ATW ? Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft at the Justus-Liebig university in Giessen, Germany. In her academic work she is mainly occupied with the problem of body in contemporary performance, theatre and dance, gender studies, philosophy of the body, art and technology, art and science, theatre and dance studies as well as the representation of identity in contemporary art. Kunst regularly publishes and teaches in several European countries. Among her publications are: Impossible Body (Ljubljana, 1999), Dangerous Connections: Body, Philosophy and Relation to the Artificial (Ljubljana, 2004).
A day later, on 19 September, Bojana Kunst will moderate a seminar on Other emancipatory histories of performance, which will follow up on her open lecture. Registration for this seminar has been closed.
About Points of Convergence. Performance and Contemporaneity:
The programme aims at examining contemporary discourses that analyse broadly defined performance arts – today, such research constitutes a significant stimulus to the worldwide development of the phenomenon. Performance which, through its emancipative nature, is becoming the key form of contemporary art and arouses growing interest in the world, remains a relatively unknown and unpractised form in Poland. What is becoming more and more discernible is the lack of theoretical reflection or a dictionary that would allow to come nearer to the contemporary performance forms which, by means of experiment, enter the areas of dialogue with the theory of art, the new media, politics and the social sphere. And it is performance itself that seems to reflect best the dynamic character of contemporary art and of contemporaneity ? in the broad sense of the word. Always happening ?here and now?, with its openness to the unknown, spontaneity, continuous emancipation and facing ?the current?, it is a medium that causes that questions are being asked about the subject of the art, its material and language, the economy of the artist and the spectator and ? first of all ? about its political effectiveness. Thus, it extorts the question of contemporaneity and being contemporary ? as dynamic as performance itself.
Hosted by: Magda Lipska.
The series Points of Covergence. Performance and Contemporaneity is held by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in association with the Institute of Music and Dance in Warsaw.
