[artinfo] Marina Abramovic Seven Easy Pieces, exhibition and international symposium

[e-Flux]

Marina Abramovic – Seven Easy Pieces, exhibition and international symposium

Seven Easy Pieces
May 6 – May 14, 2006

Kunsthalle Fridericianum
Friedrichsplatz 18
34117 Kassel
<
http://www.fridericianum-kassel.de> http://www.fridericianum-kassel.de

How to perform? – Re-enactment and documentation in performance art
Symposium, May 6, 2006, 11 am – 6pm

Auditorium of the Hessisches Landesmuseum
Gebrüder-Grimm-Platz 5
34117 Kassel

On May 5, 2006 the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, 
Kassel, opens the exhibition Seven Easy Pieces 
that presents for the first time the video 
documentation of the re-enactment of seven 
performances by Marina Abramovic in Solomon R. 
Guggenheim Museum New York at the end of 2005. 
For this project she chose programmatic 
performances of the 1960s and 1970s that she 
re-enacted in a seven hour performance at a time 
in front of an audience. Beside six historical 
performances by Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, 
Joseph Beuys, VALIE EXPORT, Bruce Nauman and Gina 
Pane, she also performed one of her new works.

The questions arousing through the exhibition 
Seven Easy Pieces and the common practice of 
documenting ephemeral art will be the central 
issues for the symposium taking place on 
Saturday, May 6, 2006. Artists, art historians, 
art critics and curators are invited for the 
discussion panels and lectures to confront the 
practice of performance with its historisation. 
This exhibition situation and proposition as 
regards the challenge of tracing ephemeral art 
works raises several highly relevant issues that 
the symposium will be addressing. Our prime 
concerns are thus the re-enactment, embodiment, 
authorship and authenticity of performances in 
both the present and historical contexts of 
performance art.

Re-enactment means acting out a performance 
again, re-making it with all the sentiments and 
knowledge engendered by the initial event and the 
here and now. It differs from pure mimicry 
because it entails a translation from one time to 
another, one narrative to another, one performer 
to another, and from one audience to another.

The symposium will focus on re-enactment as an 
act of re-positioning historical performances as 
well as the recent developments of performance 
art today. Performances relate in a particular 
way to time and presentation epitomized in the 
question of mediation (to an audience) e.g., in a 
museum and on the art market. Many performances 
from the 1970s can be accessed only through 
documentation and relicts or are now simply 
inaccessible. Contemporary performance artists 
now often integrate documentation as part of 
their performances, yet some insist on the 
particularity of the moment in which a 
performance takes place – why? What is the 
relationship between initial performance and 
re-enactment? How is meaning and experience 
transported in time through repetition of a 
performance? Can one speak of an ‘original’ 
performance?

Speakers:
Marina Abramovic (Artist, New York), Maja Bajevic 
(Artist, Sarajevo and Paris), Monica Bonvicini 
(Artist, Berlin), Erika Fischer-Lichte 
(Theoretician of Drama, Berlin), Judith Hopf 
(Artist, Berlin), Jaroslaw Kozlowski (Artist, 
Poznan), Steven Henry Madoff (Art Critic, New 
York), Sandra Umathum (Theoretician of Drama, 
Berlin) Dorothea von Hantelmann (Art Historian 
and Curator, Berlin)