Performance, as a live and time-based form, presents particular opportunities for curatorial practice. Unlike an artwork that can be encountered repeatedly within a museum or gallery, a performance is shaped by its duration, context, audience, and the specific conditions in which it takes place. This seminar will examine how performance can be curated, presented, contextualized, and mediated within different institutional and exhibition formats.

The seminar will begin with a brief introduction to the history and changing meaning of curating, followed by an examination of the emergence of performance within museums, galleries, biennials, and other exhibition contexts. Particular attention will be given to the relationship between the curator, the artist, the institution, and the audience, as well as to questions of authorship, documentation, and spectatorship.

Further sessions will focus on concepts such as Claire Bishop’s “Gray Zone” and Nicolas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics,” considering their influence on contemporary exhibition-making as well as the critical debates surrounding them. The seminar will also look at documenta fifteen as a recent example through which questions of collective practice, participation, institutional structures, and curatorial responsibility can be examined.

A substantial part of the seminar will consist of encounters with invited artists, curators, and cultural practitioners, as well as visits to studios, exhibition spaces, and cultural institutions. These sessions will provide an opportunity to discuss different approaches to performance and curating directly with practitioners working in the field and to consider how theoretical questions are reflected in current curatorial practices. Guests will include curators who are specifically working in live art curating, curators who run project spaces, performance artists who work solo or performers who have worked with well-established names in the contemporary art scene, festival directors, or people who work in the administrative department of cultural institutions.

In the final part of the seminar, participants will develop their own exhibition and presentation formats. Each participant will propose a curatorial concept, after which the group will collectively select one proposal to be realized. The selected participant will take on the curatorial role, while the other participants will contribute their own artistic works to the resulting exhibition or performative program. In this way, the seminar will conclude with a project in which the participants experience both the curatorial and artistic dimensions of exhibition-making.

The seminar therefore combines theoretical discussion, close examination of existing curatorial practices, encounters with practitioners, excursions, and practical project development. It aims to provide an environment in which participants can critically engage with the possibilities and limitations of curating performance while developing their own approaches to exhibition-making and artistic practice. 

The seminar language is English. 

The regular attendance at the seminar and involvement in the end-of-the-seminar project with a curatorial proposal and artistic contribution are mandatory to receive 2 credit points. The final project/performance programme will potentially take place in April 2027, but more information will follow during the first meeting. Due to the final project, the limit of attendance is 12 people. The course is open to applications from all KHB students who are interested in curating and performance. The list of guest speakers and the location of the exhibition space for the final project will be shared during the first week. The seminar will be held on Tuesdays at 18:30 in the former “professors’ cafeteria” next to the cafeteria, but depending on the guest speakers’ schedule or the content of an excursion, the seminar time and date might vary. All dates for each month will be shared one month in advance. Please send an e-mail to  

canberk.akcal@stud.kh-berlin.de 

before the first meeting to apply for the course and come by for the first info-meeting on 20th October at 18:30.