Marina Abramovic
Seven Easy Pieces, exhibition and symposium
May 6-May 14, 2006
Kunsthalle Fridericianum
Symposium: How to perform? Re-enactment and documentation in performance art.
May 6, 2006, 11 am 6pm
Auditorium of the Hessisches Landesmuseum
www.fridericianum-kassel.de
Marina Abramovic Seven Easy Pieces, exhibition and international symposium
Seven Easy Pieces
May 6 May 14, 2006
Kunsthalle Fridericianum
Friedrichsplatz 18
34117 Kassel
Tel. 49(0)561 70 72 720
Fax 46(0)561 77 45 78
office@fridericianum-kassel.de
How to perform? Re-enactment and documentation in performance art
Symposium, May 6, 2006, 11 am 6pm
Auditorium of the Hessisches Landesmuseum
Gebrüder-Grimm-Platz 5
34117 Kassel
On May 5, 2006 the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, opens the exhibition Seven Easy Pieces that presents for the first time the video documentation of the re-enactment of seven performances by Marina Abramovic in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York at the end of 2005. For this project she chose programmatic performances of the 1960s and 1970s that she re-enacted in a seven hour performance at a time in front of an audience. Beside six historical performances by Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman and Gina Pane, she also performed one of her new works.
The questions arousing through the exhibition Seven Easy Pieces and the common practice of documenting ephemeral art will be the central issues for the symposium taking place on Saturday, May 6, 2006. Artists, art historians, art critics and curators are invited for the discussion panels and lectures to confront the practice of performance with its historisation. This exhibition situation and proposition as regards the challenge of tracing ephemeral art works raises several highly relevant issues that the symposium will be addressing. Our prime concerns are thus the re-enactment, embodiment, authorship and authenticity of performances in both the present and historical contexts of performance art.
Re-enactment means acting out a performance again, re-making it with all the sentiments and knowledge engendered by the initial event and the here and now. It differs from pure mimicry because it entails a translation from one time to another, one narrative to another, one performer to another, and from one audience to another.
The symposium will focus on re-enactment as an act of re-positioning historical performances as well as the recent developments of performance art today. Performances relate in a particular way to time and presentation epitomized in the question of mediation (to an audience) e.g., in a museum and on the art market. Many performances from the 1970s can be accessed only through documentation and relicts or are now simply inaccessible. Contemporary performance artists now often integrate documentation as part of their performances, yet some insist on the particularity of the moment in which a performance takes place why? What is the relationship between initial performance and re-enactment? How is meaning and experience transported in time through repetition of a performance? Can one speak of an original performance?
Speakers:
Marina Abramovic (Artist, New York), Maja Bajevic (Artist, Sarajevo and Paris), Monica Bonvicini (Artist, Berlin), Erika Fischer-Lichte (Theoretician of Drama, Berlin), Judith Hopf (Artist, Berlin), Jaroslaw Kozlowski (Artist, Poznan), Steven Henry Madoff (Art Critic, New York), Sandra Umathum (Theoretician of Drama, Berlin) Dorothea von Hantelmann (Art Historian and Curator, Berlin)
The Symposium on May 6, 2006 will take place at the auditorium of the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Gebrüder-Grimm-Platz 5, 34117 Kassel. Symposium languages are English and German.
The exhibition Seven Easy Pieces in the Kunsthalle Fridericianum is open May 6 May 14, 2006. Wednesday Sunday 11 am 6 pm
More information concerning the concept and the schedule of the symposium as well as the exhibition programme: www.fridericianum-kassel.de
