PRAXIS AS SPACE.
Study Day.
2023 Chillida Chair + Institute of Art History at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Wednesday 24th of May 2023 2:00 – 7:00 pm CET .
Online Zoom event https://uni-frankfurt.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5YucOihqDMvHNIF0PwOHyTK5YAhbFbSNp5x

Praxis as Space offers a moment to reflect on how the last three years have altered and heightened the awareness and experience of immediacy and distance in the arts. This study day will focus on the lingering tensions we grapple with in thinking about duration, presence, and absence in the framework of the exhibition as a social site. Almost fifty years after RoseLee Goldberg addressed space’s complex relation to the very experience of experience in her seminal essay “Space as Praxis” (1975), notions of site specificity and affective agency have changed dramatically and yet remain constant. This reciprocity between stillness and movement through various media is especially relevant when thinking about the ritual of the liminal (Wood 2017/Turner 1995) in relation to performative environments and settings that move from one institutional context to the next.

In considering this passage of time, a series of questions arise. How do recent site-specific interactions invested in social relations respond and question the cultural status quo? In what ways can the staging of materiality and immediacy challenge institutional temporalities? And how can new forms of articulating movement impact and (re)determine the significance of participation and agency in contemporary art?
In thinking through these and other questions, the Praxis as Space study day will consider the performative as a transdisciplinary medium and discursive practice from various curatorial, artistic, and theoretical perspectives.

*******
Programme
14.00 Welcome – Antje Krause Wahl and Stefanie Heraeus (Frankfurt)
14.15 Introduction: Praxis as Space – Barbara Clausen (Frankfurt/Montreal)
14.30 Poetics of Gravity: Bodies and Affects in the Institutional Space – Izaro Ieregi (Donostia-San Sebastián)
15.15 Break
15.30 Embodied Sensations: How we performed during the pandemic – Ana Janevski (New York)
16.15 Post-Covid: Rethinking the Terms of Performance – Lisa Beißwanger (Marburg)
17.00 Break
17.15 Jimmy Robert: All dressed up and nowhere to go – Christina Lehnert (Baden-Baden) - Q&A with Jimmy Robert (Berlin)
18.00 On felt structures: weather and embodiment– Tanya Lukin Linklater (North Bay, Ontario) - Q&A with Kelly Kivland (Columbus, Ohio)
18.45 Closing discussion

*******
Speakers
Lisa Beißwanger is a substitute professor of modern and contemporary art history at the Philipps-Universität Marburg.

Barbara Clausen is the 2023 Chillida Chair Visiting Professor at the Institute of Art History at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

Stefanie Heraeus is the Director of the MA Curatorial Studies programme at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule.

Izaro Ieregi is an artist working in performance and notions of the sculptural. Applying a methodology traversed by time and space; places, social structures, objects, and movement and feelings, she explores the ways we feel and articulate the world.

Ana Janevski is a curator in the Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she has organized more than 30 performances since 2011.

Kelly Kivland is chief curator and director of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.

Antje Krause Wahl is Heisenberg Professor for Contemporary Art at the Institute of Art History Goethe University Frankfurt.

Christina Lehnert is a curator at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, where she most recently curated the exhibition Jimmy Robert: All dressed up and nowhere to go.

Tanya Lukin Linklater creates performances, works for camera, installations, and writings that cite Indigenous dance and visual art lineages, structures of sustenance, and the weather.

Jimmy Robert works with diverse media including photography, collages, objects, art books, short films, and performance art, staging and engaging with art historical discussions and contemporary issues.

*******
Praxis as Space is organized by Barbara Clausen as part of her 2023 Chillida Visiting Professorship at the Institute of Art History at Goethe University Frankfurt. It is made possible by the Etxepare Basque Institute, Donostia/San Sebastián and the Faculty of the Arts at the University of Quebec in Montreal.