Relational Acts

In the arts, aesthetic, documentary, and historiographical methods are increasingly overlapping. Relational Acts explores the multifaceted relationships between performing arts, archival processes, and exhibition practices. The contributions in this interdisciplinary volume examine the connections established through embodied forms of transmission, media-technical methods of documentation, or through processes of recording, selecting, and presenting. It addresses the relationships between performances and appropriative repetitions, between embodied practices and technical infrastructures, between performers and documentarians, as well as between performance and media history. Performance practices and their documentation are explored as knowledge-generating collaborative action spaces. Authors from art and science write about materials, media, and concepts of documentation, contributing to a media-theoretical discourse on contemporary art. The volume offers an international perspective on performance-based works with references to current exhibition projects, linking aesthetic, historiographical, curatorial, and conservational perspectives on performance art. It contributes to the ongoing debate about archives and performance.