Enter any contemporary art museum, gallery, or biennale in 2024 and chances are that the live arts will be center “stage.” While theater, dance, music, and performance art were historically presented in visual arts contexts as fringe or one-off events, since the turn of the twenty-first century—and gaining momentum over the past decade—there has been a growing tendency to “exhibit” live art. As choreographers, directors, and composers who have built their careers in the visual art world—which is significantly more monied than the performing arts world—take home major prizes and awards, leading museums are inaugurating spaces designed exclusively to house installation and performance. But architectural spaces are also ideological spaces with tacit value systems that influence conventions of performance and spectatorship, as well as perceptual experience. What happens when live arts are transplanted into the modernist project of the white cube, characterized as it is by its putative neutrality, objectivity, universality, disembodiment, and erasure of context (see O'Doherty [1976] 1999)? Today's eventized museum showcases works of art characterized by durationality (they are circumscribed by time), corporeality (they feature live, gesturing bodies), and relationality (they foreground the intersubjective exchange) that engender new modes of what Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) called “relational aesthetics.” In so doing, these works challenge traditional definitions of the “collection,” the “archive,” the “museum,” and even “contemporary art.”

The expansion of exhibition practices to include the live arts is also transforming curatorial practice. Many museums are hiring full-time performance curators, while artists and curators alike are adopting dramaturgical, choreographic, compositional, and performative strategies in their exhibition of live bodies in spaces traditionally designed to collect and present inanimate objects. What, then, does it mean to “exhibit” and “curate,” as opposed to “program” and “stage,” live art? Today, museum curators must “care” not only for objects, but also for living beings who inhabit bodies that breathe, move, need, and desire—bodies that carry their own histories and archives, and inhabit intersections of individual and collective identities. How are curators adapting to this challenge?

In the fifteen texts of “Exhibiting Liveness,” curators, scholars, artists, and cultural workers reflect on the history, philosophy, ethics, politics, and aesthetics of the institutionalization of liveness in the contemporary visual art world, creating a selected cartography of such practices around the globe. Unscripted dialogues emerge, as certain voices echo and amplify each other, while others exist in counterpoint, or even culminate in discord. This should come as no surprise. For, if, as Jacques Rancière asserts (2021), aesthetics, like politics, is characterized by the capacity to transform “the sensory fabric” of being together, then their inherent sociality makes forms of art that place live gesturing bodies in front of an audience particularly poised to generate collisions between sensory worlds.

In 1998, Jennifer Fisher and Jim Drobnick, who had recently founded the curatorial collaborative DisplayCult, organized the three-day landmark exhibition-event CounterPoses: Re-Imagining Tableaux Vivants at Montréal's gallery Oboro. The event sought to challenge both the primacy of the visual and the fetishization of the object in contemporary exhibition practice precisely by foregrounding the relational, the performative, the affective, the corporeal, and the sensorial. “Exhibiting Liveness” opens with a new piece of writing that generously contextualizes the original introduction to their 2002 exhibition catalog, shedding light on the authors’ intellectual parcours. It is followed by a reprint of the introduction, in which they expound their notion of “living display” as one that describes the tradition of staging of bodies in exhibitions across histories and cultures.

The academic articles that comprise the New Research section theorize the exhibition of liveness across four different media. Ed McKeon analyzes Berlin-based composer, director, and conductor Ari Benjamin Meyers's 2018 Kunsthalle for Music, which was “at once an institution, an exhibition, a concert, a music collection, a process, and an ensemble.” Walking readers through this “acoustic container and social experiment,” McKeon delivers a highly philosophical meditation on the ontology, performativity, durationality, and transmission of art. The polymorphous quality of the Kunsthalle is reflected in another hybrid, durational form of performance that is timed to gallery or museum hours—one that British art historian Claire Bishop (2018, 24) has baptized the “dance exhibition.” Ula Sickle takes up Bishop's theorization of the above as a “gray zone” between the traditional black box (theater) and the white cube (gallery), and highlights the intermediality of this form, as well as its resulting shift in audience attention. Embarking on a practice-led curatorial research project, Joachim Friis reflects on his position as curator of the 2023 work of environmental performance art SANDKIND by Danish artist Tora Baslev that was presented at the Agder Art Center in Kristansaand, Norway. Combining the notion of “deep ecology” with theories of the Anthropocene, Friis proposes that the slowness of the performer's manipulation of sand transformed the gallery into a productive zone of encounter between human and more-than-human material. Are curatorial projects capable of producing knowledge the way that the hard and soft sciences do? Gwendolin Lehrner posits that they are. She presents the 2019 performance exhibition Klimata, curated by Léna Szirmay-Kalos at the Berliner Flutgraben, as a paradigmatic example of her concept of “curatorial research,” suggesting that its transdisciplinary elements facilitate a new form of curatorial knowledge production.

The five texts in the Vantage Points section further probe the ways live arts projects orchestrated in museal settings both animate and destabilize such spaces. Sandeep Bhagwati draws on ancient Sanskrit terms for sound and vibration, as well as on contemporary concepts from new materialism, to think through the ways artifacts may be said to constitute vessels of trajectories of sound. In a text that both theorizes and self-reflects, he walks us through three of his curatorial/compositional projects, created over a period of twenty years, that were staged in exhibition spaces. Recalling a series of seminal works by the Taiwanese performance artist Teching Hsieh, Vanessa Holyoak delivers an intimate reflection on temporality, spectrality, the body as archive, and the museum as mausoleum. Interweaving philosophical reflections with accounts of her mother's immigration from Hong Kong to New York, Holyoak merges theory and prose, the personal and the collective, to thematize the affective experiences of Asian American subjects, as expressed in self-imaging practices. If viewing live, gesturing bodies in a museum now seems commonplace, Florian Malzacher asks us to pause for a moment and see this phenomenon anew so that we might appreciate its productive tension. His self-described “visitor's stream of consciousness” offers a first-person narration of his perceptual and associative experience of viewing Romanian interdisciplinary artist Alexandra Pirici's Re-collection. He notes both the vulnerability/precarity of these bodies, and the potential threat that they pose to the institution. While Ula Sickle sees the museum as a privileged space for the staging of contemporary dance, Chris Dupuis argues otherwise. Building on Bishop's distinction between “exhibition time” and “event time” to contrast the forms of sociality proper to museum “visitors” and live art “audiences” (2018, 29), Dupuis critiques the spectacularization of “Instagrammable” performances, suggesting that site-specific venues (both within and beyond the museum) constitute more fertile grounds for the construction of productive forms of sociality around aesthetic experience. While Bishop's characterization of the dance exhibition as a “gray zone” (2018, 38) is primarily conceptual, Alma Salem's account of the creation of a “gray box gallery” in the context of Tourab: Syria Art Space—a ten-day multidisciplinary event she curated at the Galerie Ravenstein in Brussels in April 2018—is much more tangible and political. Here, the color gray evoked the cement of buildings falling on innocent civilians during the war, while simultaneously serving as a canvas for performances that rehumanized and re- dignified the Syrian body.

Live art is an intersubjective affair: its meaning is generated through the embodied phenomenological exchange between performer and spectator. The three discussions between artists and scholars that constitute the Conversations and Interviews section mirror this dialogic framework. Maipelo Gabang interviews poet, circus artist, and performing arts scholar John-Paul Zaccarini about FutureBrownSpace (FBS)—a research initiative by and for Afro-Diasporic arts practitioners informed by Black Studies based in the Stockholm University of the Arts. Like Salem's politicization of the “gray space gallery,” FBS compels us to consider the racialized ideologies around the white cube and the black box. Gabang and Zaccarini also discuss the performance The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu by South African artist and Sangoma (traditional healer) Albert Ibokwe Khoza, which evokes a devastating chapter in the history of staging live bodies under spectatorial gaze: the exploitative and racist colonial practice of ethnological expositions. Liang-Kai Yu interviews performance artist River Lin about his trilogy of works that queer and decolonize three cultural institutions—a museum, a library, and an academy—while challenging dominant narratives and representations of the body in dance and art history. They also discuss Lin's decolonial re-enactment of dance history through his 2016 20 Minutes for the 20th Century, but Asian, which calls into question the Western-centric history of classical and modern dance, as well as the colonial systems inherent in their transmission and dissemination. How can performing artists resist the fetishization, reification, and commodification of their bodies as cultural products? Influenced by Marxist thought, Lizzie Leopold and Brendan Fernandes think through the labor involved in creating and performing dance within our post-Fordist, neoliberal economy, the clever strategies Fernandes employs when circulating his work in the art world, and the ways in which we might configure the relationship between a score and a budget.

“Exhibiting Liveness” also includes one book review, and, for the first time in TURBA's pages, a review of an exhibition. Show Time Book / Book Time Show, the first comprehensive monograph on the career of choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis, edited by Hendrik Folkerts and Julia Born, is carefully contemplated by Bryce Wilner, who highlights the co-constitutive process of meaning-making in the life cycle of a work of performance art, including its creation, interpretation, and documentation. Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self- Determination Since 1969, curated by Candice Hopkins and presented at Bard College, New York, in 2023, is then reviewed by Jennifer Krasinski, who situates the exhibition in relation to historical Indigenous movements for self-determination and avant-garde Indigenous collectives. For Krasinski, resistance constitutes the most significant refrain of the survey exhibition, which was the first to emphasize the centrality of theater and performance (as well as theatricality and performativity) to the development of Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Alaska Native contemporary art: “As Indian Theater affirms, resistance, like performance, is a time-based art form, one that must shift and unfold in response to the shifting, unfolding world.” Her statement resonates with Florian Malzacher's observations on the simultaneously idealistic and subversive nature that ephemerality bestows on the live arts: “Let's say: it's not resistance. It is just a reminder that resistance might be possible.” Is this, then, the political potential of the “exhibited” performative?

Tawny Andersen