Symposium on Performance Art, June 9-11, 2016

The international symposium "Collecting and Conserving Performance Art", held at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Alvar-Aalto-Kulturhaus in Wolfsburg (Germany) on June 9-11, 2016, approached a variety of issues surrounding the acquisition of performance art and its relics. The two-and-a-half day event brought together conservators, curators, art historians, artists, collectors, researchers, art educators and other professionals, who are involved in the production, distribution, collection, documentation and conservation of performance art. Perspectives on heritage development and documentation in adjacent disciplines, such as theater and dance, informed the discussion. Under investigation were a variety of existing practices for bringing an artist’s live performance into a collection, including the license to re-perform the work based on an artist-provided score; film and video recordings of historic or recent performance iterations; autonomous art installations; documentation created by former audiences, participants and producers; and performance props and other objects that represent the live event.