Transmedia curation in public spaces
Britta Peters, Director of Urbane Künste Ruhr, in conversation with Dirk Baumann, Dramaturg at Schauspiel Dortmund.

Dirk Baumann: For Skulptur Projekten Münster you curated in very broad range of formats. Most of the works were created in public spaces and not in classic exhibition or performance spaces and the artists and groups could choose their own locations. With Urbane Künste Ruhr you also work a great deal in and with public space. In doing this, to what extent is it important to you to curate artists and works without expecting them to work in a particular medium?

Britta Peters: I always work very site-specifically. Places, cities, regions present different situations: for example Münster is entirely different from the Ruhr region. Skulptur Projekteonly take place once every ten years or so in this comparatively small, highly “readable” city. The Ruhr region is much larger and more heterogeneous. Nevertheless with the ‘Ruhr Ding’ in May/June 2019 I’m trying to establish a cross-regional format tied together by a thematic frame.

DB: What sort of thematic frame is that?

BP: The first edition is entitled ‘Territories’: it’s about the relationship between identity and territory. In one sense it has a great deal to do with the region: 53 cities, three administrative districts and the notoriously parochial thinking that sadly gets in the way of a lot of things. However, the demarcation of territories is also a major global theme; by spring 2019 when the exhibition is held Brexit will presumably have happened – even if I’m still hoping it won’t – and at present you can literally see borders being put up again everywhere and how on an international level nationalist movements are increasingly gaining support. The artistic positions on this are very different and I am less concerned about the invited artists working through the topic in an academic and discursive way than with creating good projects that can be read in an interesting way under the heading ‘Territories’. For example there will be a performance work by Alexandra Pirici that will take place in the Hansa coking plant in Dortmund. This will involve a hologram that she has made herself based on what’s actually a very old pattern, similar to a magic lantern. The construction is almost 3.5m high, made up of four LED monitors, and the hologram figure that corresponds with one or two performers is created in the middle of these. This work focusses very strongly on the body as a territory, so the theme is conceived very broadly.

DB: How do you operate in your curatorial work, including now with Urbane Künste Ruhr – is the artist, the place or the work fixed first and everything else follows? Or is it always done on an individual basis?

BP: It’s different every time. In Alexandra Pirici’s case, the hologram has requirements from the technical side: it can’t be seen in an outdoor public space and the construction is too delicate for that. In the washroom at the Hansa coking plant the theme of the body or to be more precise the absence of the body, resonates perfectly: the washroom was the place the miners would winch their clothes up to the ceiling in baskets, a place of bodily transformation. But there are also projects, like the one by Ivan Moudov that we hope to realise in the funeral hall in Bochum: when I was in Bulgaria last year, in Sofia, there were numerous conversations about the Bulgarian art scene being barely visible because there is no international exchange. Traditionally Bulgaria doesn’t even have a pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Ivan Moudov has often referenced this lack of representation in his artistic oeuvre. In 2005 for example he claimed that that a Museum of Contemporary Art would be opened in a disused railway station. International art journalists went there, at least 200 people, and they saw nothing. But it provided a good opportunity to discuss why such a museum did not exist. Now there is one, although it in no way fulfils the expectations one might have of such an institution. In any event, Ivan and I have decided to stage the Bulgarian national pavilion that doesn’t exist in Venice in the Ruhr – or if there does turn out to be a pavilion on Venice in 2019, then we will have the main building and the pavilion at the Biennale will be a satellite. So here it’s clear what we’re looking for: we need a building that looks something like what a Bulgarian pavilion might look like. And the funeral hall comes very close: it’s a building from the 1960s with very beautiful glass windows and a concrete dome. There is a good chance that we will be able to use this hall as it is rarely required by the cemetery itself.

DB: How would you attempt to define your personal concept of art as distinct from theatre?

BP: I think in terms of exhibitions. Within an exhibition, particularly in public spaces, it can make a lot of sense to also pay attention to certain cultural techniques. This might not be art that makes references to art history but it can still be very interesting as a cultural technique. Anselm Franke has perfected this at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, for example by placing video documentaries from the 1970s about the life of jellyfish alongside “serious” art works. And without making any claim that they are art – but the context makes this juxtaposition extremely valuable and fruitful. I share that view. The main differences I see with theatre are in terms of perception. In the visual arts one is usually alone, directed in a very subjective way, free in one’s physical movements and able to examine specific things for as long as one wants. As a rule, visual art is not a time-based form apart from those exceptions that break this very rule and are distinctive as a result. But when we think about sculpture, painting or installations, then the viewer follows their own rhythm and their own trail. At the same time this means that there are several perspectives, while in the theatre there is usually only one for each member of the audience because one is sitting in a particular seat.

DB: What is important to you when curating performances in an exhibition context? How do you react to the criticism of event culture as put forward by Jon McKenzie in ‘Per-form or else’?

BP: Such a tendency does definitely exist. On the other hand there are also a lot of performance art-ists who will fundamentally refuse to perform at openings in order to avoid precisely this expec-tation of an event. In recent years I have almost always worked on exhibition formats in public spaces that have extended over a specific duration. And with performances too in this regard I have always been interested in the moment of duration, I want them to remain accessible and not be a one-off “show”. We found some very different solutions to this at Skulptur Projekte: Alex-andra Pirici exhibited a delegated performance [note: Leaking Territories] with a set of perform-ers who performed in a loop during the extended opening hours of the historic Hall of Peace. Xavier Le Roy tried to create a performance together with Scarlett Yu that can be distributed across any number of bodies and locations [note: Still Untitled]. They gave workshops that any-body could take part in and in which they trained the participants to develop and execute certain actions. This work was not as visible in the city as it might have been to a certain extent but its concept is a very interesting one: any time, any place. Le Roy started with the question of how, given that the exhibition focusses on the notion of sculpture, he could compete with a sculpture that is available in its location 24 hours a day. He then decided to dissolve the criteria of space and time and to allow the performance to take place always everywhere. Gintersdorfer/Klaßen, who have a much stronger theatre background than Le Roy or Pirici, were able to use the Thea-ter im Pumpenhaus for their work [note: Erniedrigung ist nicht das Ende der Welt], a small the-atre where it was possible to drop in and watch at any time of day. Every day except Monday there was a performance at 5 pm with changing performers from their wide network. There were repetitions, variations, experiments with partly new and partly returning casts – this too creates a form of duration. It worked astonishingly well: there were always 250 people in the audience. And it also worked well for the performers because they did not have the pressure of a premiere. And lastly there was one more form of performative work, the one by Ayşe Erkmen [note: On Water]: This was a pier that was installed just under the surface of the water in the harbour ba-sin. It was a very large installation that was actually invisible (in the end unfortunately we did have to make it known by putting in barriers): only after the visitors had stepped onto the pier did it become visible. This was a kind of “performance by the audience”. But of course duration can also be a problem, particularly economically, and with delegated performances because they generate a kind of shift work. I’m very much aware of that.

DB: In the current edition of ‘Texte zur Kunst’ Alexandra Pirici has just written that she sees “great potential” in performances in the context of the visual arts for – among other things – “more flexible forms of presentation”. She links this potential to the versatility of those forms and postulates them being able to enter new alliances between analogue and digital, live and not-live, object and subject in order not to be absorbed into the market. Would you agree with that?

BP: Historically yes. Performance was always something that did not land directly on the art market. However, at the end of the 1960s, beginning of the 1970s there were a lot of performances that remained rather hidden from a wider audience. These were often groups of ten or fifteen artists such as Trisha Brown, who would go out onto roofs in New York and hold performances there. But of course that has changed now. Performance is no longer so distant from the market and the few documents from the 1960s/70s are highly prized. And Tino Sehgal sells his work too. Nevertheless performance is further removed from the market than painting or other material forms that simply appeal to a wider range of collectors. There are some collectors who buy per-formance art and who maintain a performance collection such as the Haubrok Collection in Ber-lin, but that has a highly individual profile. Alexandra Pirici sells her work too, including works for public spaces – that is very interesting. She has just sold a work that she developed for Stockholm to the Swedish Public Art Agency [note: Monument to Work, 2016]. There the costs for revival rehearsals are determined and set in the contract and it has been specified when and how often this work will be shown. It’s actually like a work that is kept in storage and which can be removed from that storage under certain conditions.

DB: Some critics like Claire Bishop believe that artists like Xavier Le Roy or Tino Sehgal are really surrendering their work to the market when they work with performers who are hired at very poor rates and/or also have to reveal something personal. It loses some-thing like an artistic aura of the artist’s presence is there in, for example, performances by Marina Abramović when she performs a work herself. In delegated performances the public sees performers who are apparently unknown. What do such works, that Claire Bishop terms “delegated performances”, mean for you – the individual perfor-mance, the individual performers, the movements detached from the body or simply the idea?

BP: That is a question I have never actually asked myself but I think it is different from artist to art-ist. For me the art work is the moment that I am witnessing. In other cases I certainly think the idea is stronger, such as in Martin Creed’s ‘The Lights Off’. That is just a large dark space where the light is off. It’s very amusing within an exhibition but it’s also somehow a one-liner. Nevertheless the work is interesting because on a philosophical level it formulates exactly the same questions you just asked me.
And as far as the question of performers’ fees goes, I would say that it is up to artists and cura-tors to negotiate working conditions with the performers that are less precarious. To pay them well means an hourly wage of around 30/40 Euro. And if someone who has worked as a dele-gated performer creates a performance of their own, there is nothing standing in their way – he or she is not fixed in an existence as a delegated performer or a body without a personality. I would not see that so dogmatically, it always depends when and how someone works with their people. I know for example that Alexandra Pirici has just created a work in Berlin [note: Aggre-gate, 2017], where there were considerably more performers than audience members. She would have liked to pay them more than she was ultimately able to. To make up for this she made a contract that states that the performance is communal property, in other worlds, whenever this work is shown, all the performers taking part will receive a share of the terms that Alexandra herself negotiates for the revival.

DB: One difficulty in transmedia curating is usually creating a link between the works that gives them equal status. How do you approach the challenges of the different time sys-tems when you curate live works alongside objectified art? Do you attempt to create a dramaturgical meta-narrative for the public to follow or do you rely more on the au-tonomy of the visitors?

BP: It always depends a great deal. As I’ve said, I very much value the autonomy of a public that makes its own decisions about the timing, duration and place where works are considered. At the same time I think it is important that there are not too many projects in one exhibition. Skulptur Projekte, for example, were limited to 35 works. It’s also important that individual works have a certain kind of complexity in themselves: these are individual positions in a group context – this makes it interesting because you can relate the works to each other. In the Ruhr this is vastly more difficult. Here too we have limited ourselves to 20 projects but hardly anyone will manage to see everything in one day. We try to compensate for this by running the exhibition for eight weeks. In addition to that what matters to me isn’t just the art, but also the space in between: the paths, the encounters. Art in public spaces has the effect of intensifying perceptions and with those intensified powers of perception one also sees the paths between the art works differently: we suddenly suspect everything might be art.

DB: Some representatives of the visual arts such as Dorothea von Hantelmann, for example, are currently working on creating a new kind of institution between the Black Box and the White Cube that can react flexibly to the broadest range of art forms and remain as free as possible from hierarchies among those forms. What do you think of projects like The Shed? Is there an ideal space for you for transmedia curation or does this always need to be negotiated anew?

BP: I find it an interesting concept, but I can imagine that certain works that are critical of institu-tions, particularly that try to work with breaking conventions, might no longer function in such an institution. There was a concept in the 70s that was called ‘The Museum of the Future’: it was supposed to include a swimming pool. That’s interesting but at the same time it might quickly turn into an “event centre”. But fundamentally I agree with everything that is going to bring dif-ferent publics into contact with each other, particularly at a time when public life is increasingly separated into filtered bubbles. Cedric Price’s ‘Fun Palace’ is actually the mother of all these concepts and ideas.

DB: With Urbane Künste Ruhr you are working in and for 53 cities – a highly decentralized way of working. How do you create connections, possibly indeed in a transmedia way?

BP: This has given me a lot of sleepless nights. Eventually I had the idea of turning this structural problem directly into a theme because it also has a lot to do with the issue of territories. Motion begins to represent a form of openness when one can include the possibility of going the wrong way or wandering around – viewed metaphorically it is the opposite of trends based on identity that are based on static roots. At the same time personally I’m a committed cyclist and I’m trying to make as many of the projects as possible reachable by bike, for people to be able to borrow bikes, take them with them by train etc. All the locations have been selected so that they can be reached by public transport. Then we also want to work together on a broader scale with various associations and institutions, ranging from city libraries and adult education centres to football and sports clubs. We invite them to so-called “lantern tours”: a format in which around ten peo-ple come together with a moderator. This group then sets off to go and see one or two projects, depending on how many they have time for. The route is an important part of this, the idea of movement and not only the destination. The tours are also a way of meeting other people who are interested. I imagine that after going out together once these groups might then go on other tours together – or different groups will join up.

DB: Why do you think museums and galleries are more open to new forms of live work than theatre spaces? Is this linked to habitual ways of seeing or different traditions?

BP: They’ve played a significant role in the visual arts since the 1960s/70s. I don’t know whether the theatre is so averse to them. The Ruhrtriennale programme also includes plays that are six hours long [note: Diamante. The History of a Free Private City. Mariano Pensotti/Grupo Marea]. Particularly in these large industrial spaces there are theatre forms where a great deal of what I’ve described as typical of the visual arts, such as choosing one’s own location or the movement through the space, plays a large role. But clearly classical theatre that starts at 7.30 and finishes at 10 and where one expects the actors to give their all has a different tradition.

DB: In recent years institutions in the performing arts have also adopted methods of pro-duction and reception from the visual arts: spectators are individualized, they can au-tonomously construct their own narrative etc. If you could wish for something from the theatre, what would it be?

BP: What really annoys me about the theatre is its overt political stance. In the theatre I sense a wide discrepancy between proclaiming world revolution during the performance and then afterwards everyone gets into their BMWs and drives home. I think that’s a highly externalized form of radicalism but one that’s neither genuinely radical or properly thought through. That’s why I find the visual arts – even though they sometimes seem a bit dry – are more complex in their underlying thinking, their level of reflection and their humour. I think I’m a very political per-son but I don’t expect something I do tonight to change the world. That’s what theatre tries to suggest to me. Art is a more unwieldy medium but it does change the perceptions of people who engage with it, their sensibility for aesthetic, structural and social fabrics, their awareness of po-litical conflicts – and of course ultimately of the world too.

Britta Peters became Director of Urbane Künste Ruhr in 2018. A qualified art historian, from 2015 – 2017 she belonged to the team of curators for Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017. Prior to that she curated a diverse range of exhibitions in cities including Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main.

Bibliography

Bishop, Claire (2017): ‘Black Box, White Cube, Public Space.’ In: Out of Body, Hg. v. Skulp-tur Projekte Münster. pp. 1–5.

Hantelmann, Dorothea von (2018): What is the new ritual space for the 21st century? New York.

König, Kaspar, Britta Peters und Marianne Wagner (Hg.) (2017): Catalogue Skulptur Projekte Münster. Leipzig.

Pirici, Alexandra (2018): ‘Performance als Beschwörung. Artist Statement.‘ In: Texte zur Kunst 110, pp. 75–80.