PERFORM A LECTURE!
A series of events in six parts. 

Perform a Lecture! is a project in six parts that seeks to explore the genre of �lecture performance� both practically and discursively. Developed in the 1960s as a subgenre of performance, lecture performances have been present in contemporary art for years. Perform a Lecture! brings together performances by internationally renowned and emerging artists, and approaches the genre, its history and recent developments in a series of conversations between art historians, curators, philosophers, artists and the audience. The presentations are organized in collaboration with various institutions in Berlin.

Perform a Lecture! seeks to reflect on the timeliness of the format and the �politics� of the medium. Located between speech and action, between reflection and production, the lecture performance lies in a �grey area, essentially thematizing relations between art and knowledge or research, and art and its dissemination. Lecture performances potentially open up a discursive field on which to address issues such as recent shifts in the conception and understanding of the artwork on the one hand and the art context (�third wave of institutional critique�) on the other.

Performance. While the then purely reflexive format of the lecture was first used as an artistic medium to question established concepts of the artwork and the mechanisms of the art context, current lecture performances use it as an already recognized form of artistic expression that can be put to many purposes. Six invited artists develop new performances or show projects that will be presented in Berlin for the first time.

Conversation. Six parallel conversations will form a base line connecting each performance to the others in the series and establishing a continuous, explorative dialogue. Inviting a different guest each time from the fine arts, theater and/or theory, curator Ellen Blumenstein and philosopher and dramaturge Felix Ensslin will attend all events � thus taking on the role of a �repository of memory� that carries forward questions and output from one conversation to the next.

Artists. Dan Graham, Nicolas Guagnini, Pedro Neves Marques, Ellie Ga, Erik B�nger, Olivia Plender/Romeo Gongora, Will Holder.

Perform a Lecture! is organized in collaboration with the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden K�nste, Stuttgart, Lehrstuhl f�r �sthetik, Kunstvermittlung und psychoanalytische Kulturtheorie; Sonderforschungsbereich 626, Freie Universit�t Berlin; Tiergarten 1 (Eternithaus); Radialsystem V � New Space for the Arts in Berlin; .HBC Berlin; ICI Berlin; Salon Populaire / Kunstsaele Berlin.

Dan Graham/Nicolas Guagnini
Tourguide � A Platonic Dialogue Through the City

Performance. The American artist Dan Graham explores Bruno Taut�s vision of �Au�enwohnraum� (�Outer-Habitation-Space�) on a performative tour through Berlin. As admirers of the German architect, Graham and his colleague Nicolas Guagnini develop a question-and-answer game, starting at Taut�s �Hufeisensiedlung� (�Horseshoe-Colony) in the district of Neuk�lln. In form of a platonic dialogue, the lecture performance guides through this first large housing development of Berlin, with which Taut declared the question of taste to be a social question in the late 1920s. Further stops include walks through the satellite-housing �Gropiusstadt� and �Hansaviertel�, the model colony that was built for the �Interbau� (international fair for construction) at Berlin�s district of Tiergarten in 1957.

Conversation. Introduced by a screening of Dan Graham�s video 'Performer/Audience/Mirror' (1975, 20 min.), which is considered to be one of the early lecture performances, this evening with the American art historian Eric de Bruyn re-connects the format�s history to its potential today. Based on concrete examples from Graham�s practice over the last four decades, the discussion will explore the background for current interest in lecture performances and intends to formulate a framework of questions that position the format within a broader context.
Participants: Dan Graham, Nicolas Guagnini, Eric de Bruyn, Felix Ensslin, Ellen Blumenstein.

Date/Location (Conversation). Saturday, May 8, 6 pm. Eternithaus (Tiergarten 1)

Limited admission. Please RSVP to [email protected]

Supported by:
DAAD
Johnen Galerie

Pedro Neves Marques: On the invisibility of performance and the resonance of lives-
- 3 proposals explored

Thursday - Saturday July 8-10, 8 pm

Salon Populaire

Performance.
During three days a setting will be staged for three proposals to be shared. Eminently rhetorical and of oral / written qualities, each proposal focuses on specific lives and events of resonances both ethical and aesthetic, namely: Ilya & Emilia Kabakov�s Palace of Projects / Berlin Wall crossings (1961-1989); Arthur Rimbaud�s African life (1880-1891); and Thor Heyerdahl�s Tigris Expedition (1978). After having been presented elsewhere as isolated moments, these three proposals are brought together for PERFORM A LECTURE! so as to resonate anew with each other within a present frame of discussion, reflection and relation. Each day will be lead by Pedro Neves Marques and will take different performative shapes according to the respective proposal, from discussion and lecture based to image and text projection.

Thursday, July 8
The Escape Route's Design: Assessment of the Impact of Current Aesthetics on History. Comparative Reading of an Example Close to the City of Berlin (in collaboration with Mariana Silva).
This performance stages a dialogue between the incomplete projects within Ilya Kabakov�s installational body of work and the series of attempts at border crossing over the Berlin Wall from East to West from the 1960s to 1989. Through this dialogue the supposition is advanced of an already made realization of Ilya & Emilia Kabakov�s proposals, specifically the �Palace of Projects�, by way of the historical events occurred at the Berlin Wall. Given the aesthetic revision of these historical events, it is proposed a ready-made historical utopia through temporal synapses between art and life, and such an invisible revolution has already occurred in the past. The piece has taken the shape of an artist text circulating since 2008, and will be explored further within the framework of PERFORM A LECTURE!
For details and previous reading, a full version of the artist's text is available to print at e-flux.com/journal/view/61. It is recommended to read this text prior to attending the performance.

Friday, July 9
The Wandering Chief (1880-1891)
This evening takes as a case study the process that lead Arthur Rimbaud to abandon literature and his subsequent life as merchant in the Horn of Africa, Harare and Aden. The proposal takes as its starting point the biographer Charles Nicholl's affirmation of Rimbaud's African life as his masterpiece � opening itself for the experience of vertigo that such an understanding of life as art engenders. Consequently, the proposal considers the ethical-aesthetical consequences of such view in respect to art but fundamentally to the artist, is role and visibility. The performance for two people will be followed by a common discussion mediated by the artist.

Saturday, July 10
The Tigris Expedition (1978)
The last night takes at its core the Tigris Expedition lead by anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl in 1978. The expedition had as its main purpose the construction of a reed ship modeled after Sumerian vessels dating from 5000 years ago and involved navigating through the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean in search of ancient commercial routes between Sumer, the Hindus Valley and Egypt. After a five month long voyage, the vessel was not allowed to continue further into the Red Sea due to conflicts at the Horn of Africa. There the expedition met its end on the shores of Djibouti, an end which was consummated by burning the ship as a sign of protest against the conflicts in the region and the international interests fueling them. The presentation will be followed by a general discussions mediated by the artist.

Conversation.
Transversal lines to pursue during the three days will be the relationship of anonymity to exemplarity, of exemplarity to life and of life to the invisibility of performance; the (un)consciousness of being in the creative act � Is it art? � and its consequences on spectatorship; is there a contemporary typology of art, and if so what is its relation to visibility and nomenclature? Is everyone an artist � seriously? �, and if we say yes, is the question how or when?
Participants: Pedro Neves Marques, Solvej Ovesen, Felix Ensslin, Ellen Blumenstein.

The proposals will be made with group discussion ensuing afterwards or during the presentation. It is preferred that participants attend all of the three days of performances.

Limited admision. Please rsvp to: [email protected]

Ellie Ga: The Fortunetellers Part 1 + The Fortunetellers: Arctic Circles

Wednesday September 15, 8 pm

ICI Kulturlabor Berlin

Performance. 'The Fortunetellers' began in 2008 when Ga spent five months as an artist-in-residence aboard the 'Tara', a scientific expedition in the Arctic Ocean. The project is a mediation upon nature of prediction as it was manifested during the expedition including ancient forms of fortunetelling, weather forecasting, oceanographic research, and the day-to-day routines of ten people drifting in the Arctic with no control over there immediate future. 'The Fortunetellers Part 1' has been shown at various places in Europe and America, amongst others at MOMA /PS1 Contemporary Art in New York, and will now be shown for the first time in Germany. Ga conceives 'The Fortunetellers: Arctic Circles' especially for 'Perform a Lecture!' and will premiere this second part of her project in Berlin.

Conversation. This conversation with the artist and theorist Clemens Kr�mmel investigates the relationship between artistic and scientific modes of research and in which way lecture performances contribute to both realms. Deliberately using traditional strategies from either field, artists (and art works) produce knowledge in a specific way. This discussion pursues the transformations of the aesthetic on the threshold of science which began to appear with the dissolution of boundaries in art after 1960.