Embodied and Body knowledge: Modes of contemporary performance

In artistic practices, bodies play a decisive role as “movement material” (Kelter/Skrandies), as in walking through cities and landscapes, in surveying urban spaces and institutional sites, in acoustic echolocation learned by animals and beyond in acoustic, performative, and dance exploration. In the connection between body techniques and movement, in the inscription of experience and memory, they become repositories of embodied, praxeological, and situated knowledge.

They function as a medium for various routes in Manhattan and their documentation on postcards sent out in On Kawara's I Went series, as a place and instruction manual in the breathing of a space, as in one of Yoko Ono's Instruction Pieces, as static horizontal long-term interventions, as in Maria Hassebi's PLASTIC on corridors and staircases in the Stedelijk Museum, or as interventions in public space by Chien Chieh-jen and four fellow activists against colonial structures and repression with their politics of bodies in the collective in Dysfunction No. 3 in the streets of Taipei. The materialistic, sensory, emotive, social, cultural, political, and traumatic inscriptions in bodies and their kinesthetic, retrievable embodiments of knowledge serve as their living, situated archives.

In the seminar, we will delve into historical and current praxeological, discourse-theoretical, and relational aspects of the body at the margins of various forms of expression, from performance to audio walks, and engage with body practices and their de-skilling.

Readings:

Beatrice Allegranti, “Bodies as Knowledge”, in: dies. Embodied Performances: Sexuality, Gender, Bodies, Basingstoke 2011.

Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Signs, Vol. 28, No. 3, Gender and Science: New Issues (Spring 2003), S. 801-831.

Elena Biserna (Hg.), Going Out. Walking, Listening, Soundmaking, Brüssel 2022.

Pierre Bourdieu, Sozialer Sinn. Kritik der theoretischen Vernunft, Frankfurt am Main [1993] 2020.

Cosmin Costinaş/Ana Janevski (Hg.), Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The New Performance Turn, Its Histories and Its Institutions, Berlin 2017.

Tim Ingold, “Against space. Place, movement, knowledge”, in: ders., Being Alive Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, Milton Park/New York, S. 178–189.

Tom Jeffreys (Hg.), Walking (= Documents of Contemporary Art), Whitechapel Gallery, London 2024.

Erin Manning, Relationscapes. Movement, Art, Philosophy, Cambridge/London 2009.

Peggy Phelan/Jill Lane, The ends of performance, New York 1998.

Joanna Zielinska, Performance Works, Ausst.-Kat. Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warschau 2019.