Revolving Documents - Narrations of the Beginnings

A collection of essays that offer an understanding of how performance art can be a tool for dissent against power structures and a means to reach a broad audience outside informed art circles.

Challenging dominant histories of the genre, this book focuses on trans-local and transcultural connections and seeks to generate and expand knowledge on different narrations of the beginnings of performance art. It brings together essays by leading international scholars, curators, archivists, and artists to explore the strategies and tools which museums, galleries, theorists, and artists use to understand artistic and activist practice. Written from different perspectives and thus offering multiple methodological frameworks, the publication comes as a result of an intensive dialogue between authors coming from various cultural contexts, including contributions from Switzerland, Slovakia, the United States, Israel, Germany, former Yugoslavia, the United Kingdom, and Italy. 

Sabine Gebhardt Fink is an art historian, author, and curator of performance art. She has a professorship in contemporary art at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Tacredi Gusman is assistant professor in theater and performance studies in the Department of History, Humanities, and Society at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Andrej Mircev is an academic, dramaturge, and visual artist from the former Yugoslavia. He is a guest professor at the University of Arts in Berlin.