Enter any contemporary art museum, gallery, or biennale in 2024, and chances are that performance art will be center “stage.” While historically marginalized in the art world, since the turn of the twenty-first century—and gaining momentum over the past decade—performance is being “exhibited” front and centre in major museums around the globe. Performance artists are taking home illustrious art world prizes, leading museums are inaugurating spaces designed exclusively to house live art, and the field of performance curation is gaining traction. Simultaneously, within academia, the concept of “performativity” is increasingly mobilized across the philosophy of language, deconstruction, gender and queer theory, critical race theory, and the recently founded interdisciplinary field of performance philosophy. There, it is used to theorize how language enacts that which it describes, how meaning is configured through intersubjective exchanges, and how (gendered, racial, sexual, and cultural) identities are formed and expressed.
It is within this cultural landscape, and in response to the above paradigmatic and epistemological shifts, that PERFORM emerged. The project sought to develop a theory of performativity as artistic and curatorial practice that would account for the importance of both performance and performativity in present-day European cultural practices informed by 21 st century identity politics. Its four main objectives were: O1) conducting research on contemporary European performance and curatorial practice; O2) training in live arts curation and professionalization skills; O3) disseminating research in academia; O4) communicating findings in the art world.
