Relational Acts: Performance Practices and Media of Documentation

Aesthetic, documentary and historiographical processes are intertwined increasingly in the arts. Relational Acts explores the complex relationships between performance arts, archival processes, and exhibition practices. The contributions to this interdisciplinary volume examine the relationships established via embodied forms of transmission, media-technical methods of documentation, or processes of recording, selection and presentation. The subject is the relationships between performances and appropriative repetitions, between embodied practices and technical infrastructures, between performers and documentarists, and between performance and media history.

Performance practices and their documentation are explored as knowledge-creating, collaborative spheres of action. The authors from the fields of art and science write about the materials, media and concepts of documentation. In doing so, they contribute to a media-theoretical discourse on contemporary art.

• International perspective on performance-based works with reference to current exhibitions
• Linking aesthetic, historiographical, curatorial and conservational perspectives on performance art
• Contribution to the current debate on archives and performance

Ulrike Hanstein ist Professorin für Kunst- und Medienwissenschaften an der Kunstuniversität Linz und leitet das VALIE EXPORT Center _ Forschungszentrum für Medien- und Performancekunst.

Barbara Büscher ist Professorin für Medientheorie/Intermedialität und lehrte bis zu ihrem Ruhestand an der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig. Dort leitet sie aktuell – gemeinsam mit Franz Anton Cramer – das Forschungsprojekt „Subverting archival practices".

Franz Anton Cramer, Tanzwissenschaftler und Philologe, ist Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Forschungsprojekt „Subverting archival practices" an der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig.

Ulrike Hanstein, University/VALIE EXPORT Center, Linz; Barbara Büscher, Franz Anton Cramer, Leipzig Academy of Music and Theatre