Relational Acts

Aesthetic, documentary and historiographical processes are intertwined increasingly in the arts. Relational Acts explores the complex relationships between performance arts, archival processes, and exhibition practices. The contributions to this interdisciplinary volume examine the relationships established via embodied forms of transmission, media-technical methods of documentation, or processes of recording, selection and presentation. The subject is the relationships between performances and appropriative repetitions, between embodied practices and technical infrastructures, between performers and documentarists, and between performance and media history.

Performance practices and their documentation are explored as knowledge-creating, collaborative spheres of action. The authors from the fields of art and science write about the materials, media and concepts of documentation. In doing so, they contribute to a media-theoretical discourse on contemporary art.

• International perspective on performance-based works with reference to current exhibitions
• Linking aesthetic, historiographical, curatorial and conservational perspectives on performance art
• Contribution to the current debate on archives and performance