Divided into three larger chapters, the conference focuses on the first day (3 April) on the new performance turn, the paradigm shift that has been increasingly bringing dance into the museum and doing it in a new way. It looks at the economic and political conditions behind this shift. It acknowledges that “performance” has a double meaning, as a live element in the arts and as a reference to economic productivity. And while doing so, it points out that these new developments are caught between apparently resisting the commercialization that has engulfed the object-based art world over the same period, and being the perfect products of the immaterial experience economy, where memory itself is a prime commodity. Guests of this session include Andre Lepecki (Associate Professor at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University), Boris Buden (Berlin-based writer and cultural critic), Xavier Le Roy (Berlin-based dancer and choreographer), Bojana Cvejić (Brussels-based performance theorist and dramaturg), Tang Fu Kuen (Bangkok-based curator and producer of contemporary performance), Mårten Spångberg (Sweden-based choreographer and theorist), Cosmin Costinas (Executive Director and Curator at Para Site, Hong Kong), and Dick Wong (Hong Kong-based dancer and choreographer).

The second part on 4 April looks at the more recent proliferation of living bodies in exhibition spaces, and of dance in museum programs. It tries to understand what are the institutional realities that allow this to happen and the institutional transformations that respond to this change. It looks at performance as a new instrument of curating and organizing meaning and while doing so, it asks whether there has been a crisis of the vocabulary of curating that has been conveniently suspended by the energy of performance. And in regards to museums, it wonders what is possible to acquire for future generations, and how should performance be displayed? Contributors of the day include Emily Roysdon (New York and Stockholm-based artist and writer), Pierre Bal-Blanc (Director and Curator at Contemporary Art Center of Bretigny, France), Gabi Ngcobo (Johannesburg-based curator and artist), Low Kee Hong (Hong Kong-based director and curator), Stuart Comer (Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Catherine Wood (Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance at Tate Modern, London), Danny Yung (Hong Kong-based artist, director, producer, and founder of Zuni Icosahedron), Ana Janevski (Associate Curator in the Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Doryun Chong (Chief Curator, M+ Hong Kong), and Manuel Pelmus (Bucharest-based dancer and choreographer).

The third chapter on 5 April is composed of case studies of different histories of performance art within the field of visual arts, in different geographies, throughout the twentieth century. It discusses how and why these histories are being recuperated, translated and integrated or on the contrary excluded from the new institutional realities of contemporary art. Which histories are privileged and which ones are dismissed? Does the new paradigm of performance need these histories and are these histories legitimate historical precedents for this new paradigm? Or is the new performance turn too much a product of our times and its roots in the performance art of the late avant-garde too vague? Participants in this section include Raiji Kuroda (art historian and Chief Curator, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan), Georg Schoellhammer (Vienna-based editor, author, curator and editor-in-chief of springerin magazine), Lee Weng Choy (art critic and Deputy Director and Senior Curator at NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore), Fernanda Nogueira (Brazilian researcher, curator and literary critic), Adrienne Edwards (New York-based scholar, writer of performance, and Associate Curator at Performa Institute), Inti Guerrero (Hong Kong-based curator, Associate Artistic Director at TEOR/éTica, San Jose, Costa Rica), Anthony Yung (Senior Researcher at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, and co-founder of Observation Society, Guangzhou), Goran Sergej Pristaš (director, choreographer, dramaturg, and assistant professor at the Drama Department of the Academy of Dramatic Art, Zagreb, Croatia), Moe Satt (Yangon-based visual and performance artist), and Claire Tancons (New Orleans-based curator, writer and researcher).