Full presentation Catherine Wood

Taking the example of Tania Bruguera’s 2018 commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, 10,148,451, I will discuss questions of value in relation to the institution of the art museum, through the lens of performance.  Questions about care, intimacy, empathy are central to the journey that Bruguera’s practice represents, culminating in this work, and central to an attempt to critique the value system embodied by the museum.

Beginning with my experience of working as a curatorial assistant in the British Museum, and learning about the choreography of care around ancient artefacts, often displaced from cultural and ritual contexts, I take this formative experience as a kind of blueprint for the matrix of the museum and its values: material and human.  As a curator at Tate Modern specialising in performance, the imprint of that early experience and its relevance to the fundamental set-up of the Western art museum persists, and comes into often antagonistic dialogue with the attempt to commission, display and collect ‘live’ performance work, even – or especially – when it is entangled with practices in so-called traditional media of painting or sculpture.  

I will talk about how an artist such as Tania Bruguera, emblematic as someone working with ‘performance’ today in an expanded practice, emerged from work grounded in an intimate form of body art practice and protest that set itself clearly against material practices in art (collecting, selling etc) and has moved towards working on the ‘social body’ in ways that transforms the institutional and its set-up; but always working from a located, emotional perspective.

Walter Mignolo, who coined the concept of ‘decolonial aesthetics’, has written of the significance of the body’s presence in art in terms that resonate with Bruguera’s self-staging, and institution-shaping: proposing the importance of delinking from certain principles of civilisation via a return to one’s own, located and delimited reality. Intervening in and interrupting the human infrastructure of the institution, from this starting point located in the artist’s own body, its status as a ‘keeper’ of objects or a space for gathering is probed, tested, and extended.

Program What Has Love Got To Do With It

18th February 2019

10:30

Liliana Coutinho, Cláudia Madeira, Giulia Lamoni

10:45 – 11:30

The public, the private and the political in the performative works of young artists and students of fine arts: a case study

Teresa Furtado, artist, assistant professor, Department of Visual Arts and Design, School of the Arts, University of Évora, CHAIA/UÉ

chair: Bruno Marques, IHA-FCSH, UNL

11:30 – 13:00

Panel 1

Sexualities

chair: Giulia Lamoni, IHA-FCSH, UNL

Talking about Love, Publicization of intimate matters in contemporary dance plays

Claire Vionnet, anthropologist

Down and Dirty: Ecosex intimacies and the appeal of the ‘personal’

Jon Cairns, Critical Studies Leader, BA Fine Art, Central Saint Martins

Ropework: performing fragility

Daniel Cardoso, FCSH NOVA University

Telma João Santos, University of Évora

13:00 – 14:00

Lunch

14:00 – 14:45

Radio Intimacy – a poadcast

Ana Pais, researcher in performative arts, FCT postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Theater Studies, FLUL, dramaturgist, curator

14:45 – 16:15

Panel 2

Resistances

chair: Margarida Brito Alves

How Intimacy Disrupts Power

Claire Schneider, independent curator in Buffalo, New York, and founder and director of C.S.1 Curatorial Projects

From private archive to public discourse: Karol Radziszewki’s Kisieland

Flóra Gadó, PhD candidate at Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Budapest, Hungary

16:15 – 16:30

Break

16:30 – 18:00

Panel 3

Performativities

chair: Cláudia Madeira

Love + Other Pressing Issues: Barbara T. Smith’s 21st Century Odyssey, 1991-1993

Pietro Rigolo, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Proximity, emotions and technological mediation in Italian Performance Art of the origins

Francesca Gallo, Sapienza University of Rome

The Will of (Im) Possible: artistic lovers couples in the Art of Performance

Nelson Guerreiro, researcher

18:30

keynote

The Body Politic: the museum as a space of intimacy and action

Catherine Wood, senior curator of International art / Performance, TATE Modern

chair: Liliana Coutinho

19th February 2019

10:30 – 11:10

Tu & Eu | You & Me

Susana Mendes Silva, artist and assistant professor at University of Évora, DPAO, i2ADS, FBAUP

11:15 – 12:45

Panel 4

Mediations

chair: Bruno Marques

All Together - Feedback Now - Total Access Inc. (on my personal Coca Cola memories and other globalised pop affects)

Paula Caspão, writer and artist, FCT postdoctoral research fellow, lecturer at the Centre for Theatre Studies (CET/FLUL - UL), associate researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History (IHC-UNL)

Intimacy and affectivity in cyberspace

Paula Varanda, PhD, researcher

The Act of Being ‘Together Alone’:Slow Cinema and the Re-Design of One’s Intimate Interaction with the Concept of Realness

Susana Bessa, writer

12:45 – 14:00

Lunch

14:00 –14:30

Reading (room 2)

Community, by Luiz Pacheco

Directed by: Ana Palma
With: Ana Palma, André Simões, Constança Carvalho Neto, Diogo Lopes and Rita Monteiro
Creation: Teatro da Garagem

14:45 – 16:15

Panel 5

Narrating

chair: Fernando Matos Oliveira

On female desire in poetic autobiographies

Ana Lúcia M. de Marsillac, psychologist and postdoctoral fellow at IC Nova - FCSH/UNL

Paulo Jesus, psychologist, assistant professor of psychology at Portucalense University, researcher at the Philosophy Centre - UL

Woman standing in front of the mirror. An intimate practice-as-research project

Sol Garre, Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático de Madrid

16:15 – 16:30

Break

16:30 – 18:00

Panel 6

Care

chair: Liliana Coutinho

Agape and Anthropocene

António Contador, Institut Acte, University of Paris 1/CNRS, artist

Performing the ‘I Care’

Kathryn Lawson Hughes, Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Performative ‘Intraventions’ and Matters of Love, Care and Delay: Steps Towards Responsible ‘Worlding’

Alberto Altés Arlandis, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow / Chair of Methods and Analysis TU Delft, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment - Architecture

18:30

Keynote

Performative Gestures

Rabbya Nasser, artist, curator and teacher at NCA, Lahore, Pakistan

chair: Giulia Lamoni, IHA-FCSH, UNL