Provenance Performance, a collaborative research project, sets out as a performative methodological act that constitutes a researching institutional critique. Artistic and academic scholarly practice form a research alliance dedicated to the concept and idea of provenance and its institutional setting, its presence and absence in museums. Provenance Performance is a project of exploration and rediscovery of the diverse and socially relevant, transcultural meanings of provenance in order to create and implement necessary transdisciplinary approaches in provenance research. Therein lies not least the challenge of processing the connection between the museal and public understanding of provenance.

Provenance Performance enters the museums and produces commentaries as well as recommendations for action in and on the fields of meaning and intervention of provenance. These concern, among other things, research and presentation formats, documentation and archives, communication and participation, knowledge production and transfer as well as transparency, historical awareness, language and narratives. The implementations in the institutions are individualised, taking into account factors such as the collections, history, structures. The focus is neither set only on art and art history, nor exclusively on the Nazi-loot context and colonialism. Thus, museums of different categories and types are included in order to keep the view as differentiated as possible.

Provenance Performance develops integrative methods to raise awareness of the essential epistemological potential of provenance for different areas and work processes in museums. This awareness is a decisive condition for the self-conception of the institution and opens up critical evaluation.

The students will gain insight into the project, be introduced to the horizons and possibilities of provenance in museum work throughout tangible examples, and participate in the emergence of a Provenance Performance. Readings, discussions, tasks for testing transdisciplinary methods as well as excursions enable a multi-perspective approach.

The workshop will be co-hosted by Isabel Hufschmidt and Ruby Sircar.

Ruby Sircar loves pop culture, especially when it has an anti-colonial face. Favourite examples at the moment are Ms. Marvel and Master of None. Performance and language, sound and migration are the cornerstones of my artistic work at the Academy of Fine Arts, as a board member of IG Bild, and in my role for VBKÖ.

During the preliminary meeting, an exercise will be assigned that has to be prepared until the first session in May. Individual consultations on the status of work will take place in the last week of April. Apart from that, queries and appointments are possible at any time.

Mandatory for obtaining ECTS:

Attendance at the preliminary meeting, the individual consultation, and all sessions; maximum 3 hours of absence (180 min.) allowed

Preparation of exercise (as assigned in the preliminary meeting) and its short presentation in May

Reading

Active oral participation

The workshop is limited to a maximum of 15 participants.

Subject to changes