Performing Collections

In recent decades, the visual arts have witnessed an unprecedented development of performative practices. This has brought about both a heated academic and institutional debate about the notion of performance and the phenomenon of performativity – in relation both to ways of presenting performance in the exhibition space and to the problem of creating museum collections made up of performance works. This publication gathers the results of the many years of research work of the collection curators and performance scholars associated with the museum confederation L'Internationale aiming to address the following question: Why museums should collect performance?

The issue of how to collect performance is at the heart of this publication, organized in three parts: Essays on the subject, case studies and a glossary.

Contributors: Amira Akbıyıkoğlu, Persis Bekkering, Lotte Bode, Zofia Czartoryska, Clémentine Deliss, Lola Hinojosa, Chantal Kleinmeulman, Bojana Kunst, Myriam Rubio José A. Sánchez, Claudia Segura, Igor Španjol, and Joanna Zielińska

Performing Collections is available to download in PDF and EPUB formats at internationaleonline.org.