Curating Performance/Curatorial Performativity

A selected history of curating performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand 1970–2020

Resetting the Coordinates: An anthology of performance art in Aotearoa New Zealand
EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER BRADDOCK, IOANA GORDON-SMITH, LAYNE WAEREA AND VICTORIA WYNNE-JONES
Massey University Press, 2024
ISBN: 9781991016546

Bruce Phillips & Heather GALBRAITH

Performance art’s continued relevance and potency stems in part from its inherent transdisciplinary nature, regardless of whether it manifests as a solo bodily action, sound, material trace, social exchange, video documentation, cultural ritual, a process of research, or collaboration. However, this rich disciplinary ambiguity that can present a significant challenge for curators and institutional infrastructures. To give the expanded understanding of performance its due emphasis, curators are required to navigate the hurdle of getting artists and audiences together within institutions of visual art.

This challenge that can sometimes lead curators to rely on ‘default’ event-based conventions or, conversely, to introduce novel curatorial approaches that could risk impinging upon artistic agency. But the challenge also presents many possibilities, especially when disciplinary definitions are relaxed and when exhibition forms and institutional processes are made more malleable.

The examples of exhibition-making practice discussed in this chapter suggest that curators and other exhibition-making practitioners in Aotearoa have employed forms of curatorial performativity to overcome, engage or indulge these tensions and possibilities of exhibiting performance art in its expanded sense. This discussion draws on patterns of curatorial and exhibition-making practice identified through a recent survey of performance-focused and performance-inclusive group exhibitions across fifty years (1970–2020) in 47 of Aotearoa’s publicly funded art organisations.