The new performance turn, its histories and its institutions,
“Para Site is proud to present “Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The new performance turn, its histories and its institutions.” The 2014 edition of Para Site’s International Conference is a major international forum discussing the renewed encounter between dance and performance and the institutions of global contemporary art, marking one of the most significant set of developments in the art field over the last decade.
The past twenty years have seen contemporary dance emerging as a new field of discourse and thinking. While writing within and about these developments is still in its infancy, this scene has produced some of the most powerful works of our times, reflecting the major intellectual directions and the changes in the world over these decades. More recently, dance and performance have entered the institutional realm of contemporary art, with more artists working in and around these disciplines, and with more museums, art centers and biennials considering how to deepen their commitments to performance. While these are global phenomena, the resources needed to mobilize such processes (and the sheer budgets for many dance productions) mean that they are primarily visible in the centers of cultural power around the world. However, a loosely related history of performance art as a category of visual art has been written for a longer period of time, and it is composed of multiple, fragmentary and geographically dispersed stories, many of them marking older turning points in their respective contexts, be it around the 1950s in Japan, 1960s and 1970s throughout Latin America and Eastern Europe, 1980s in China, or the 1990s in parts of South East Asia and Eastern Europe. This conference attempts to look at these interconnected stories, and in the process to point out and to extend the boundaries of what is possible in the paradigm of art and performance today.”
Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The new performance turn, its histories and its institutions, Para Site International Conference 2014
The Hong Kong Jockey Club Hall, Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty, Hong Kong
Edited by Cosmin Costinaș and Ana Janevski, designed by Wkshps, New York, and co-published with Sternberg Press, the book is expanded from the 2014 eponymous conference organised by Para Site and includes eighteen commissioned essays and conversations by André Lepecki, Bojana Cvejić, Claire Bishop, Catherine Wood, Xavier Le Roy, Boris Buden, Amy Cheng, Fernanda Nogueira, Miguel A. López, Nelly Richard, Inti Guerrero, Anthony Yung, Carol Yinghua Lu, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Ruth Noack, Adrienne Edwards, Simon Soon, Patrick D. Flores, David Riff, and Mårten Spångberg, as well as inserts by eleven artists and groups including Firenze Lai, Simryn Gill, Belkis Ayón, Rabih Mroué, Tetsuya Ishida, Emily Roysdon, Manuel Pelmuș, Yangjiang Group, Eisa Jocson, Victoria Lomasko, and Gauri Gill. Dedicated to the renewed encounter between dance and performance and the institutions of global contemporary art, the book proposes that a “new performance turn” has emerged in the second decade of the century, and looks at its correlations with other shifts in practices, discourses, and broader society.
Edited by Cosmin Costinas and Ana Janevski
Designed by Wkshps
Published by Para Site, Sternberg Press
2017
224 pages
Hardcover, 22 x 28 cm
ISBN 978-3-956791-18-5