Performing in the surveilled totality, André Lepecki
Monday 20 Jan 2025 from 7pm to 8:30pm
Free upon registration
Talk in english
Ambient and Circumstances – performing in the surveilled totality.
While black, brown, indigenous, gender nonconformed, and other minoritarian bodies are slaughtered away from the scene of proper circulatory subjecthood even in so called “open” and “democratic” societies, recent pieces in dance and performance art keep finding ways to move away the surveilled totality – creating place, destroying time, affirming life regardless, in spite, despite the toxic ambient.
André Lepecki will discuss a few of these artists and some of their works, their anti-logic of movement, their anti-logic of time, and their combative and yet joyful aesthetics that finds, in the adversity of circumstances, choreopolitical force for the ongoing struggle.
Full Professor at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, and Associate Dean, Center for Research & Study, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Editor of several anthologies on performance and dance theory, and author of Exhausting Dance: performance and the politics of movement (2006, published in thirteen languages), and of Singularities: dance in the age of performance (2016).
He has curated festivals and projects for HKW-Berlin, MoMA-Warsaw, MoMA PS1, the Hayward Gallery, Haus der Künst-Munich, Sydney Biennial 2016, among others.
In 2008 he received the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (USA Section) award for “Best Performance" for co-curating and directing the authorized redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (a commission of Haus der Kunst 2006, performed at PERFORMA 07).
Since 2008, he participates in several of Brazilian artist Eleonora Fabião’s actions.
He is currently curating an online exhibit of Paul McCarthy’s early works for Xavier Hufkens gallery, Brussels.