Performance The Ethics and the Politics of Conservation and Care, Volume I

List of figures

List of contributors

Introduction: Caring for performance 
HANNA B. HÖLLING, JULES PELTA FELDMAN AND EMILIE MAGNIN

PART I
Care: Theoretical entanglements

1 Charisma and desire in the conservation of performance art 
PIP LAURENSON

2 Not, yet: When our art is in our hands 
REBECCA SCHNEIDER AND HANNA B. HÖLLING

3 Vitality and the conservation of performance 
HÉLIA MARÇAL

4 Conserving the un-conservable: Documenting environmental performance for the twenty-first century 
GABRIELLA GIANNACHI

5 Innovation and preservation: Shadreck Chirikure on the performance of heritage—A conversation with Hanna B. Hölling

PART II
The politics and institutions of care

6 An experimental acquisition: Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room (2014)
at the Walker 
IONA GOLDIE-SCOT

7 In the shadow of the state: Collecting performance at IMMA and
institutions of care in the Irish context 
BRIAN CASTRIOTA AND CLAIRE WALSH

8 Towards a performance continuum: Archival strategies for
performance-based artworks 
FARRIS WAHBEH

9 Peeling the paint off the walls: Kelli Morgan on Black performance
and racial justice in Western Institutions 
HANNA B. HOLLING, JULES PELTA FELDMAN AND EMILIE MAGNIN

10 Performing the “Mask”: Kongo Astronauts (Eléonore Hellio and
Michel Ekeba) on postcolonial entanglements 
HANNA B. HOLLING, EMILIE MAGNIN, VALERIAN MALY AND JACOB BADCOCK

PART III
Living conservation

11 Knowledge has to live: Dread Scott on Slave Rebellion
Reenactment (2019) 
JULES PELTA FELDMAN

12 Conserving a performance about conservation: Care and
preservation in Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s maintenance art 
KAROLINA WILCZYN´ SKA

13 Living materials: Ethics and principles for embodied stewardship 
CORI OLINGHOUSE AND MEGAN METCALF

14 Precarious movements: Contemporary dance as contemporary art 
ERIN BRANNIGAN AND LOUISE LAWSON

15 Potential afterlives: Cauleen Smith on the relation of film to
performance 
HANNA B. HÖLLING AND JULES PELTA FELDMAN

Contributors

Erin Brannigan is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance at the
University of New South Wales. Her publications include Moving Across
Disciplines: Dance in the Twenty-First Century (Sydney: Currency House,
2010), Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011) and Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers,
co-edited with Virginia Baxter (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2014). She
has published various chapters and articles in film, performance and dance journals
and anthologies. Her current research project is Precarious Movements:
Dance and the Museum, and has two monographs associated with this project:
Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s (London:
Routledge, 2022) and The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and
Material in Contemporary Art (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2023).

Brian Castriota is Time-Based Media Conservator at the National Galleries
Scotland, Freelance Conservator for Time-Based Media and Contemporary
Art at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Supervising Conservator with the
Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, and newly appointed Lecturer in
Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media at University College London’s
History of Art Department. He has previously held lecturer positions
at the University of Glasgow and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
He completed graduate-level training in conservation at the IFANYU
(2014), he was a Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Time-Based Media Conservation
at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2014–16) and he received
a PhD in History of Art from the University of Glasgow (2019). As part of
the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN New Approaches in the Conservation of
Contemporary Art (NACCA) his doctoral research examined notions of
artwork identity and authenticity commonly invoked in conservation theory
and practice, and he has published various articles and book chapters on
these topics. He co-edited a special issue of ArtMatters International Journal
for Technical Art History (2021), and he is co-editing a volume on the conservation
of contemporary art in the Getty Conservation Institute’s Readings
in Conservation series.

Shadreck Chirikure is Edward Hall Professor of Archaeological Science in the
Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of
Oxford where he holds a British Academy Global Professorship. He is
Adjunct Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cape Town. Chirikure
applies techniques from the hard sciences to study ancient materials and technologies.
He uses the results of discoveries in the field and the laboratory to
develop new understanding, conserve heritage and to tackle global challenges.
Chirikure is the Editor of the journal Archaeometry, Editor in Chief of the
Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African Archaeology and Senior Editor of
the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Anthropology. He sits on editorial
boards of more than 12 journals in archeological science, archeology and
heritage science.

Jules Pelta Feldman is an art historian, critic, curator, archivist, and salonnière.
They are postdoctoral research fellow for the project Performance: Conservation,
Materiality, Knowledge, which is sponsored by the Swiss National
Science Foundation and hosted by the Institute for Materiality in Arts and
Culture, Department of Conservation and Restoration, at Bern Academy of
the Arts. Pelta Feldman received their doctorate in art history from the
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and has previously worked in
various capacities at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney
Museum of American Art, and the Grey Art Gallery. Pelta Feldman writes
criticism for publications in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States.
They are also director of Room & Board, an artist’s residency and salon.
Formerly located in Brooklyn, Room & Board is now based in Basel and
additionally commissions socially-distanced artworks.
Gabriella Giannachi is Professor in Performance and New Media at the University
of Exeter, UK. She has published a number of books including: Virtual Theatres
(2004); The Politics of New Media Theatre (2007); Performing Presence:
Between the Live and the Simulated, co-authored with Nick Kaye (2011); Performing
Mixed Reality, co-authored with Steve Benford (2011); Archaeologies
of Presence, co-edited with Michael Shanks and Nick Kaye (2012); Archive
Everything (2016 and, in Italian translation, 2021); Histories of Performance
Documentation, co-edited with Jonah Westerman (2017); Moving Spaces:
Enacting Dance, Performance and the Digital in the Museum, co-edited with
Susanne Franco (2021) and Technologies of the Self-Portrait (2022). She has
written papers for several humanities and science journals and has been an
investigator in a number of AHRC, RCUK, EU, Nesta and Innovate funded
projects in collaboration with Tate, Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art
Gallery, Factory 42 and LIMA.

Iona Goldie-Scot is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at Maastricht University
in the Netherlands. Her research has its foundations within the research program
New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA)—
a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network established to resolvefundamental questions concerning the identity, values and authenticity of
modern and contemporary artworks and the consequences for their conservation
as well as rethink historically-grown professional distinctions
such as those between the curator and the conservator. Iona’s research
interests specifically lie in the institutional changes occurring in museums
in light of the increasing acquisition of performance-based artworks, the
shifting nature of custodian responsibility, and the efficacy of varying
methods of documentation in the preservation of performance artworks.
Prior to her doctoral studies she received a Distinction in her MA from
Sotheby’s Institute of Art and was awarded a First-class Master’s degree
from the University of St Andrews.

Hanna B. Hölling is a Research Professor and Principal Investigator at the
Bern University of Applied Sciences—Academy of the Arts, where she leads
two projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is also
an Honorary Fellow in the Department of History of Art at University
College London (UCL). Prior to her current roles, Hanna was Associate
Professor in the Department of History of Art at UCL, where she specialized
in the History of Art, Media and Technology. She also served as a
Mellon Visiting Professor for Cultures of Conservation at the Bard Graduate
Center in New York. Hanna received her doctorate from the University
of Amsterdam (2013). She has also held the position of Head of
Conservation at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Hanna is the author of several monographs, including Paik’s Virtual
Archive: On Time, Change and Materiality in Media Art (University of
California Press, 2017) and Revisions—Zen for Film (Bard Graduate
Center, 2015). Additionally, she has edited anthologies such as The Explicit
Material: Inquiries on the Intersection of Curatorial and Conservation
Cultures (with Francesca Bewer and Katharina Ammann; Brill, 2017) and
Object—Event—Performance: Art and Materiality since the 1960s (Bard
Graduate Center, 2022).

Kongo Astronauts is an artist collective based in Kinshasa, founded in 2013 by
Michel Ekeba and Eléonore Hellio. Their multi-media practice includes
photography, film, sculpture, and performance, and engages with Kinshasa’s
alternative culture network. Through the lens of Afrofuturism, they explore
the multilayered cultural, political, and environmental histories of the Congo
and its exploitation to reconsider its present. Integral to their practice are the
“astronaut suits” worn by Ekeba, which are built from used and discarded
electronics. Kongo Astronauts are interested in the creation of works that
sometimes might be difficult to classify, works whose forms might be
ephemeral or unstable, works which generate attitudes and processes, works
which respond to a place or a context, given or constructed. They describe
their own practice as “an attempt to resist the psychic ghettos that cover
multiple postcolonial realities.” Other participants include Bebson Elemba,
Céline Banza, Amourabinto Lukoji, and Daniel Toya.

Pip Laurenson is a Professor of Conservation at University College London
(UCL) and director of the MSc in the Conservation of Contemporary Art
and Media at UCL East. Pip has 30 years of experience in the conservation
of contemporary art, establishing and leading Tate’s pioneering Time-based
Media Conservation section from 1996 until 2010. Between 2010 and 2022
Pip was Head of Collection Care Research, working to develop, lead and
support research related to the conservation and management of Tate’s collections.
From 2016 to 2022 Pip held a special chair as Professor of Art
Collection and Care at Maastricht University. Pip is committed to interdisciplinary
research that serves and responds to art of our time and the
major challenges facing the conservation of contemporary collections in the
21st Century. She has secured awards for research from a range of funders
and from 2018-2022 she led the Mellon Foundation funded project Reshaping
the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum. She received her
doctorate from University College London, is an accredited member of the
Institute for Conservation and is a member of the Steering Committee of the
International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (INCCA).

Louise Lawson is Head of Conservation at Tate. She is responsible for the leadership,
strategic direction and development of conservation at Tate. She has
been developing how performance artworks in Tate’s permanent collection
are documented and conserved, through the project Documentation and
Conservation of Performance at Tate (2016–2021). Louise has shared the
knowledge developed through this project via lectures, presentations and
academic publications. She has also been part of the wider project team for
Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum (2018–2021),
with case studies on Tony Conrad and on replication. Her current research
project is Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum.

Emilie Magnin is currently a PhD candidate within the Swiss National Science
Foundation research project Performance: Conservation, Materiality,
Knowledge at the Bern Academy of the Arts. Her research focuses on the
institutional changes prompted by the increasing acquisition of performance
artworks in museums, and particularly on the role and influence of conservators
in this process. Emilie completed a master’s degree in Conservation-
Restoration with a specialization in modern materials and media and
holds the position of Conservator for Media Art and Installations at the
Kunstmuseum Bern. She has previously worked as a Conservation Fellow at
the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, as a contemporary art
conservator for private practices, and as a moving image archivist for the
Swiss Archive of the Performing Arts and the University Library of Fribourg.

Valerian Maly is a performance artist, lecturer and head of the performance art
department at the MA CAP at the Bern Academy of the Arts. He acts as a
curator of performance-based projects and exhibitions. For over thirty-six
years, Maly has lived and worked with Klara Schilliger with whom he hascreated intermediary and mostly site- and situation-specific performances
and installations (often called InstallActions). The duo has lived and worked
in Lucerne, Cologne, Bern and in La Chaux-de-Fonds. In 2008, they were
awarded the Art Prize of the municipality of Berne. In 2016, they were elected
to the International Artists’ Committee IKG, which, analogous to the
PEN Club, campaigns for freedom of art, cultural self-determination, tolerance
and cultural diversity. In the late1970s, as a cultural producer, Maly
founded the film, video and performance festival VIPER. He was artistic
director of several festivals, such as Pfeifen im Walde in Berlin (1994),
Lucerne Festival (1997), the palindromic festival “emit time” at the Freie
Akademie Bern (2002) and the performance art festival BONE (2011-2017).
Maly initiated and co-curated two exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Bern:
Terry Fox: Elemental Gestures (2017) and République Géniale after Robert
Filliou (2018).

Hélia Marçal is a lecturer, researcher, and conservator based in London. She is
Lecturer in Art, Materials, and Technology at University College London’s
Department of History of Art, having previously worked as a Fellow in
Contemporary Art Conservation and Research of the Andrew W. Mellon
funded research project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in
the Museum at Tate (2018–2020). She has been the Coordinator of the
Working Group on Theory, History, and Ethics of Conservation of the
International Council of Museums’ Committee for Conservation since 2016.
She received her doctorate from NOVA University of Lisbon and has published
various articles and book chapters on conservation theory and ethics,
conservation of time-based media and performance art, embodied memories
and the body-archive, and participation and stewardship of cultural heritage.
Her recent book project explores posthuman ethics in museums.

Megan Metcalf is an art and dance historian who brings a practitioner’s perspective
to scholarly research, combining work in institutional and personal
archives with a background in dance and choreography. She received her
PhD in contemporary art history from the University of California, Los
Angeles (UCLA) in 2018 and has held positions at institutions including
ArtCenter College of Art and Design (Pasadena, CA), Otis College of Art
and Design, the Getty Research Institute, and UCLA (all Los Angeles, CA).
Her work has been published by the Bard Graduate Center (NY), Danspace
Project (NY), and Open Space (SFMOMA) and supported by the New York
Public Library and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others. She
is currently at work on a book about the history of dance and performance
in art museums and is a History of Art and Visual Culture fellow at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021–2023.

Kelli Morgan is a Professor of the Practice and the Inaugural Director of Curatorial
Studies at Tufts University. She is a critical race scholar as well as a
curator, educator, and social justice activist who specializes in American artand visual culture. Her scholarly commitment to the investigation of anti-
Blackness within those fields has demonstrated—among others, in persuasively
formulated statements—how traditional art history and museum practice work
specifically to uphold white supremacy. Morgan has held curatorial positions at
the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, the Birmingham Museum of Art,
and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Before joining the Tufts
faculty, she held various teaching positions where she merged the classroom and
the museum gallery to create anti-racist paradigms for how curators can
actively address the complexities of traditional art history, community engagement,
and scholarly innovation.

Cori Olinghouse is an artist, archivist, and curator working with performance
and time-based media. In 2017 she founded The Portal, an artist-led initiative
that cultivates archiving as a poetic and performative practice. Recently,
she collaborated with Charles Atlas on a moving image installation for
“Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done,” at The Museum of
Modern Art. In 2019, she collaborated with the Studio Museum in Harlem
on the acquisition and restaging of Autumn Knight’s performance work
WALL—the first performance to enter their permanent collection. Formerly,
as archive director for the Trisha Brown Dance Company, she developed a
cataloguing and preservation initiative to assist in the legacy planning for
Brown’s company and archive (2009–2018), a company she danced for from
2002 to 2006. She holds an MA in Performance Curation from the Institute
for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University and serves as
visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. https://
theportal.place.

Rebecca Schneider is Professor of Modern Media and Culture at Brown University
in Providence, RI, USA. She is the author of The Explicit Body in
Performance (1997), Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical
Reenactment (2011), Theatre and History (2014), and the long form
essay “Slough Media” in Remain (2019). She has edited several collections,
including special issues of TDR: The Drama Review on “Performance and
New Materialism,” “Precarity and Performance,” and “Performance and
Social Reproduction.” Over fifty other essays appear in journals and
anthologies internationally and her work has been translated into multiple
languages. Recently, her essay “That the Past May Yet Have Another
Future: Gesture in the Times of Hands Up,” Theatre Journal in 2018,
received the Oscar Brockett Best Essay Award with the American Society for
Theatre Research. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and she has served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at
Queen Mary University in London, a Mercator Fellow at Goethe University
in Frankfurt, and has delivered invited talks at museums around the world.
She is currently working on two projects, a digital book on gesture and a
project titled Shoaling in the Sea of History, taking up media, performance,
history, and the oceanic for which she was named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.

Dread Scott is a multimedia artist based in Brooklyn. His first major work,
What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag (1988), made while he was a
student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, became the center of
controversy, denounced as a desecration of the American flag by then-President
G.H.W. Bush and outlawed by Congress. His work—in installation,
photography, screen-printing, video and performance—addresses historical
and contemporary injustice and inequality. For his 2019 Slave Rebellion
Reenactment, Scott staged a reenactment of the 1811 German Coast Uprising,
the largest revolt of enslaved people in U.S. history. His art has been
exhibited at such institutions as MoMA/PS1, The Walker Art Center, Contemporary
Art Museum St. Louis, Kunsthal KAdE (Amersfoort, Netherlands).
He is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a United
States Artists Fellowship and a Creative Capital grant. His work is in the
collection of the Whitney Museum and The National Gallery of Art.

Farris Wahbeh, Benjamin and Irma Weiss Director of Research Resources,
works within the field of cultural informatics to enhance access to art and
archival collections. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, he oversees
the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library and Archives, the Permanent Collection
Documentation Office, which maintains the cataloguing and content standards
relating to works of art in the Whitney’s permanent collection, as well
as Visual Resources. Wahbeh also spearheaded, along with the Conservation
Department, the Media Preservation Initiative (MPI), a focused project on
the digital preservation and archival documentation of time-based media
works of art. Wahbeh has gained experience from a wide range of institutions,
including Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
the Getty Research Institute, the Creative Audio Archive, and Intuit: The
Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

Claire Walsh is Art Collections Curator at the Centre for Research Collections,
the University of Edinburgh. She is currently on career-break from her position
as Assistant Curator: Collections at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in
Dublin. Prior to this she worked at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern
Art, Edinburgh and MAP Magazine, Glasgow. Recent curatorial projects
include The Narrow Gate of the Here-and-Now: The Anthropocene (2021-
22); Ghosts from the Recent Past (2020-21); and Archive 1990s—From Edge
to Centre (2019-20). She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from
Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh (2013). Areas of research
include the museum and the Anthropocene, collecting performance and the
relationship between contemporary art practice and the archive. Since 2016,
Claire has collaborated with Brian Castriota on numerous preservation projects
in both Edinburgh and Dublin.

Karolina Wilczyn´ska is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Art History at the Adam Mickiewicz University. The subject of her PhD research is the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles as a case study aimed at a criticalrevision of socially engaged art, its methodology as well as its history. She completed the Erasmus Programme at The History of Art Department at the University College London. She supported the work of “The Legacy of Piotr Piotrowski” and helped in organization of the East-Central European Art Forum. In 2019 she received a Library Research Grant at the J.F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin. She is the 2021 Fulbright scholarship holder at CUNY, New York.

Biography

Hanna B. Hölling is Research Professor, Bern University of Applied Sciences—Academy of the Arts and Honorary Fellow, Department of History of Art, University College London.

Jules Pelta Feldman is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Bern University of Applied Sciences— Academy of the Arts.

Emilie Magnin is a Doctoral Candidate at Bern University/ University of Applied Sciences—Academy of the Arts and a Conservator for Media Art and Installations at the Kunstmuseum Bern.