Lecture Series.
Co-organised and hosted by Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald

Held at the Kunstuniversität Linz (University of Arts Linz) during the summer term 2026 and co-hosted by the OLFAC team, this lecture series brings together artists, scholars and curators to explore the senses as dynamic sites of practice and inquiry.

The series approaches the senses as a stage and performance as a method of sensing. It begins from the premise that both senses and performance are not fixed domains, but active, porous and contested fields of practice. Drawing on the 2007 publication of the same name by Sally Banes and André Lepecki, The Senses in Performance reactualizes their investigation into the “critical thresholds where the corporeal meets the social, the somatic meets the historical, the cultural meets the biological, and imagination meets the flesh.“ The senses are inherently political. They organise what can be felt, seen, and known. Performance, in turn, offers a laboratory for their (re-)arrangement. From a decidedly multi- and intersensory perspective, we ask how cultural and artistic performances address the sensorium. How do the senses collaborate, compete, or fail one another? And which hierarchies – e.g., between seeing and smelling, rationality and intuition, body and mind – do we still enact, often implicitly, when we perceive, create, or study?

On a weekly basis, artists, scholars and curators discuss how to think and act through sensory methods: to approach vision, sound, touch, smell, or proprioception not as neutral channels of experience but as historically and culturally shaped knowledge regimes. Across disciplines, we ask how sensory hierarchies can be worked with, and how biases – of gender, ability, race, or technology – might be engaged productively, as material for critical invention.

The lecture series is open to the public – everyone is most welcome to attend. The introduction session is held in English, lectures are held both in English and German.

All sessions take place on Wednesdays, 5:00–6:30 pm CET
Lecture Hall F (H80503), Hauptplatz 8, 4020 Linz.

A live stream will also be available. The link will be shared with registered participants. If you would like to attend online, please register via: office.olfackunstuni-linz.at.

Program

11.03. Introduction by OLFAC
Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald (ERC project OLFAC, University of Arts Linz)

25.03. 320 GB im Rucksack – der physische Aspekt digitaler Kunst über Gletscher
Tina Frank (Visual Communication, University of Arts Linz) &
Alexis Dworsky (Media Design, University of Arts Linz)

15.04. Dis_sensual – A crip choreographer’s re-distribution of the sensible
Michael Turinsky (Artist, Vienna)

22.04. Performing Snakes in Modernity and Today
Nicole Haitzinger (Dance Studies, University of Salzburg) &
Christina Gillinger (Tanzquartier Vienna TQW)

29.04. Lingering with Bass (2024, Steve McQueen)
Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz)

06.05. Sinn für Unlösbares
bankleer – Karin Kasböck & Christoph Maria Leitner
(Sculpture and Environment, University of Arts Linz)

13.05. Mimi o Sumasu – the Very Act of Listening
Mia Yoshida (Artistic Research and Head of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts Vienna)

20.05. Tasting skin. On chilis and chills
Karin Harrasser (Cultural Studies, University of Arts Linz and
Director of ifk – International Research Center for Cultural Studies)

27.05. Olfactory Violence and the Freedom to Speak: Stink Bombs in Interwar Europe
William Tullett (Early Modern History, University of York)

03.06. Sensing the Atmospheres of Painters’ Studios in Nineteenth-Century France
Erika Wicky (Olfactions, Université Grenoble Alpes)

10.06. Hee-Hawing Democracy: Somatic Articulations Beyond the Logos
Bettina Wuttig (Psychology of Movement, Marburg University)

17.06. Greetings from the Swamp
Maria Nalbantova (Artist, Sofia)

24.06. A loving ear – toward a poetic ecology of feeling
Brandon LaBelle (artist, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial, Berlin)