Now Recording: Performance.
A Symposium by the Skulptur Projekte Archives.
December 4–5, 2025,
Auditorium, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur Münster, Germany.

Located between past and present, archives are not neutral containers but active agents that document, preserve, and produce meaning. The Skulptur Projekte Archives is thus not conceived as a dead sammelsurium of documents, but as a permeable, shifting structure – shaped by the practices it holds and continually transformed through engagement. The Archives – like performance – operates through time, space, and the body, raising questions about how people affect and reshape art, sculpture, and archival knowledge.

The symposium "Now Recording: Performance" brings together diverse perspectives on the continuous present of performance in the archives – asking how performative practices are documented, how they endure, and how archival infrastructures respond to the tensions between ephemerality and permanence, memory and liveness. Framed by the exhibition Performance People, which explores how sculptural practices have been expanded, animated, and performed across past editions of Skulptur Projekte, the symposium extends this inquiry into the archival realm. It explores how archives can hold performance not only as a trace or as a record but also as something still unfolding—a form that resists capture yet persists.

While rooted in the holdings and perspectives of the Skulptur Projekte Archives, the symposium opens a wider conversation: about performance and preservation, sculpture and its expanded field, and the evolving roles of institutions in shaping cultural memory. It invites participants to consider archives not as a closed system, but as a permeable site—where the past is in motion and the performative continues to unfold.

Thursday, December 4

11:00 – 11:30 am
Greetings and Introduction
Hermann Arnhold, Director LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster
Jana Bernhardt and Marianne Wagner, Skulptur Projekte Archives, Münster

11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Resurrections and Discoveries: Potentials and Challenges of Archival Performance Research
Lisa Beißwanger, Assistant Professor for Art History and Theory, University of Koblenz

12:30 – 1:30 pm
Dancing Archives. Documentation and Revival of Pina Bausch's Choreographies
Gabriele Klein, Professor for Ballet and Dance, University of Amsterdam

1:30 – 2:30 pm
Lunch break

2:30 – 3:30 pm
Actio. Considerations on the Copyright Status of Performative Actions
Grischka Petri, Head of Copyright Research, FIZ Karlsruhe

3:30 – 5:00 pm
Case Studies: From the Records

Von da an (From Then On) in Archive. Spaces, Works, Visualizations from the Anti-Museum: www.museum-moenchengladbach-1967-1978.de
Susanne Titz, Director Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach
Susanne Rennert, Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art, Stiftung Museum Schloss Moyland

How to Archive What Slips Away. Reflections on the Archival Anxiety of the Unrecorded
Jana Bernhardt, Research Associate Skulptur Projekte Archives, Münster

Performance: Made for the Present, Collected for the Future
Marianne Wagner, Curator for Contemporary Art and Skulptur Projekte Archives, Münster

5:00 – 6:00 pm
Coffee break

6:00 – 7:00 pm
Artist’s Lecture: Everyone Was Always Early
Jeremy Deller, Artist, London

Friday, December 5

9:15 – 9:30 am
Arrival and Intro

9:30 – 10:30 am
Event, Object, Archive: Critical Approaches to the Conservation of Performance-based Works
Hanna B. Hölling, Research Professor, University of the Arts, Berne | Senior Fellow, Collegium Helveticum ETH Zurich

10:30 – 10:45 pm
Coffee break

10:45 – 11:30 am
Case Study: Substance or Soul – Soul without Substance?
Leonie Müller, Paper conservator, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster
Katja Siebel, Objects conservator, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster

11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Conversation: Spreading and Sharing. How to Distribute Archives
Maurin Dietrich, Director Kunstverein München
Vincent Schier, Curator Skulptur Projekte 2027, Münster
Eva Wilson, Curator Skulptur Projekte 2027, Münster
Moderation: Jana Bernhardt and Marianne Wagner

12:30 pm
Final Discussion followed by Goodbye Soup

Conference language: English
Conference fee: 25 Euro (including lunch and beverages)
Tickets: https://shop.lwl-museum-kunst-kultur.de/#/product/event/2436
Students can participate free of charge.

Organised by: Jana Bernhardt and Marianne Wagner