Other Emancipatory Histories of Performance
Seminar by Bojana Kunst
Alexandra Pirici: If You Don´t Want Us, We Want You, 2011. Intervention in public space, courtesy of the artist.
As the continuation and expansion of the lecture "Performance and Politics", the seminar will focus on some temporal notions: like delay, discovery and abandonment.
In the recent years many performance histories were rediscovered and reanimated, especially with their political and emancipatory potential rehabilitated and activated again. It is intriguing to relate the search for the emancipatory and political histories of the performance to the current political situation, especially to the difficulty of different political imagination and dis-empowerment of political action. We will read several theoretical texts and work with some practical examples from performance history, especially addressing also the performance works under communism.
Professor in the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies / ATW – Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft at the Justus-Liebig university in Giessen, Germany.
In her academic work she is mainly occupied with the problem of body in contemporary performance, theatre and dance, gender studies, philosophy of the body, art and technology, art and science, theatre and dance studies as well as the representation of identity in contemporary art. Kunst regularly publishes and teaches in several European countries. Among her publications are: ”Impossible Body” (Ljubljana, 1999), “Dangerous Connections: Body, Philosophy” and “Relation to the Artificial” (Ljubljana, 2004).
