Performance Day #2 - The museum performed

Béatrice Balcou
Marcelline Delbecq & Ellie Ga
Luís Félix & Ben Evans
Ricardo Jacinto
Kapwani Kiwanga
Anouchka Oler
Onze Heures Onze Orchestra Aurélie Pétrel & Vincent Roumagnac Projecto Teatral 

Part of the Centre Pompidou's 40th anniversary celebrations
In association with frac île-de-france and Fundação de Serralves 

Already a performance touchstone, Performance Day is spreading its wings as part of the Centre Pompidou's 40th anniversary celebrations.
Six international curators are joining forces for the programming of a festival combining the visual arts, theatre, film, music and literature, with a particular focus on the French and Portuguese scenes. Performance Day #2 is presenting fifteen artists, eight premieres, two exhibitions and "Digressions", a new collection of conversations with artists. 

 

 

In 2016 La Ferme du Buisson inaugurated Performance Day, an annual performance festival whose international programming would include curators from abroad with an emphasis on coproductions and freedom of movement for artists. Given artists' growing interest in an interspace between the visual and the performing arts, our art centre is broadening its approach to include other sections of La Ferme du Buisson, and thus other resources, with a variety of projects involving the entire site: theatres, studios, outdoor spaces, the media library and so on. In this fundamentally multidisciplinary context these hybrid practices using performance as an active force in the transgression of boundaries find unequalled scope for experimentation. Deliberately concentrated into a single day, the festival will give visitors the chance to share a unique experience as they stroll from event to event and from space to space in a truly remarkable setting.

With this second edition the festival is spreading its wings, joining in the Centre Pompidou's 40th anniversary celebrations and happening in two different venues: La Ferme du Buisson and the Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France. The programming has been arranged in association with the Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France, frac île-de-france and the Fundação de Serralves-Museu de Arte Contemporânea in Porto, which came up with its own "The Museum as Performance" programme in 2015. 

For Performance Day #2 the six curators will be looking into the topic of the museum performed: in practical terms how does a museum make history, what living memory does it build up, and what future is it modelling? To what extent does it contribute to a process of reification and at what point in time does it become a malleable object, transformed by historical, discursive, gestural and fictional sedimentations?

Since the 1960s–1970s artists have been constantly challenging the museum as institution: its representational codes and dominant forms of rhetoric, its capacity to reify and standardise, its modes of exhibition and dissemination, its relationship with archives and collections, and the role it assigns to viewers and transmission.

Today a whole generation of artists is revitalising what used to be called "institutional criticism" via alternative narratives that are allowing subjective, minority and subaltern voices to be heard.

At once poetic and political, their proposals grant pride of place to the invisible and the intangible, and to receptivity and attentiveness. Via interpersonal give and take, talks, guided tours, handling of objects and musical and theatrical interpretations, artists are performing singular stories of museums and art collections. 

Curators

Julie Pellegrin (Director, Centre d'art contemporain de La Ferme du Buisson)
Xavier Franceschi (Director, frac île-de-france)
Nathalie Giraudeau (Director, Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France)
Cristina Grande (Dance and performance programmer, Fundação de Serralves- Museu de Arte Contemporânea)
Ricardo Nicolau (Exhibitions curator, Fundação de Serralves-Museu de Arte Contemporânea)
Pedro Rocha (Music curator, Fundação de Serralves-Museu de Arte Contemporânea)