INSERTS IN REAL TIME, performance works 2000-2023

The publication Inserts in Real Time. Performance Works 2000–2022 is published alongside a major solo exhibition in February 2023 at M KHA, Antwerp. The book’s title refers to García’s first performance works, Inserts in Real Time (2000–03), which produced a breakthrough in her practice by abandoning performance conventions to embark towards experimental practice.

It aims to offer a space of reflection and projection into the future via 22 years of performance practice as it disentangles a very dense tissue of individual, collective, and collaborative productions from very diverse situations in non-artistic and artistic contexts (grand exhibitions such as Documenta or Venice Biennial, alternative circuits, performance festivals, galleries, private and collective spaces) with professional, amateur, and non-professional collaborators. The reflections and perspectives gathered help to deconstruct a García’s performance practice and seek to understand how all participating agents have affected each other.

The exhibition at M KHA is curated by Joanna Zielinska, also the editor of the book together with Anna-Sophie Springer from K. Verlag, Berlin. Zielinska is a well-known curator specialized in performance and author of the performance art anthology Performance Works (2020). K. Verlag is an award-winning publishing atelier and long-term a collaborator of García, with two previous publications. Other important contributors include Sven Lütticken, regular writer for Texte Zur Kunst, e-flux, and New Left Review as well as Bojana Cvejić, professor at KHiO.

 

Authors' bios:

D o r a G a r c í a is an artist and teacher who lives and works in Oslo. She is currently professor at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway. Her work is largely performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society, exploring the political potential of marginal positions.

B o j a n a C v e j i ć is author of several books, including Choreographing Problems (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Toward a Transindividual Self: A Study in Social Dramaturgy (co-written with Ana Vujanović, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2022). As a dramaturg, she has contributed to many performances and collective self-organized platforms for artistic production, critical theory, and education in Europe and former Yugoslavia.

S v e n L ü t t i c k e n is associate professor at Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Netherlands, and teaches art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He recently published Art and Autonomy: A Critical Reader (Afterall, 2022) and Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Volume 1 (Sternberg Press, 2022).

J o a n n a Z i e l i ń s k a is an art historian, writer, and performance curator. The ideas of performative exhibition and performative artwork are fundamental in her curatorial research. Her practice is centered around theater, performance, performative literature, and visual arts. She works as a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA).

 

On the occasion of a retrospective exhibition at M KHA Antwerp, Belgium, Dora Garcia reflects on the connections and contaminations happening in her individual, collective and collaborative performance practice in the last 22 years. Dora Garcia is accompanied in these considerations, with the specific purpose to project them into a contemporaneity and a certain futurology, by curator Joanna Zielinska, KHiO dance theory professor Bojana Cvejic, and author Sven Lütticken.

Buzzwords: audience, temporality, videoperformance, filmed theater, public space, social practice, real time, collective authorship, radicality, experimentalism.

What do I know now that I did not know before I made this publication? I learned to categorize my performance practice in a way that it can be related to different formats (invisible theater, stand up, monologues, durational performance) and relation to the public (captive public, participatory (knowing and unknowing) public, conventional (non participatory, frontal) public, co-authoring public. The relationship to the public, related to time (vital, representational) and space (public, semiprivate, private space) defines the place the work occupies in society.

The contribution of this publication to the field is one of systematization of an artistic practice, retroactively. I have been contemporary of what has been called "the performative turn" and now I can look back and understand what that means in relation to two capital concepts: format and public.

Index:

1. She Has Many Names

Dora García

2. Redeem the Present: Stage Your Intercessor

Bojana Cvejić

3. Nothing Can Be Repeated. Joanna Zielińska in conversation with Dora García

4. Chronology

Inserts in Real Time: Performance Work 2000–2023

5. Enacting Red Relations: On Dora García and Performance

Sven Lütticken

6. Appendix: Scripts

What a Fucking Wonderful Audience

The Artist Without Works: A Guided Tour Around Nothing

Real Artists Don’t Have Teeth

Performance

The Drawing on the Floor: A Monologue

7. Image Captions

 

The methodology followed in this publication took as a model a former catalogue, "Second Time Around which is in fact the first", published by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in the year 2018, Cristin register number 2253320. This catalogue, an anthology of my work since 1999 until 2018, presented each of the works with a representative image and a factual description, explicitly establishing connections with other works. In this new catalogue, centered in my performance work, again each performance was represented by one or two images, a factual description, and a series of buzzwords that allowed to identify the main themes addressed in each performance: audience, temporality, videoperformance, filmed theater, public space, social practice, real time, collective authorship, radicality, experimentalism. Next to that, each performance had two chronologies: the first time it was presented, and where and the last. This choronology seemed to me the most adequate to represent living arts; while the buzzwords allowed the readers to identify the main themes and how they wove a net over the chronologies. The intention of this book is above all to be an object of study facilitating an overview of a vast and complex body of work. From my perspective, it is an efficient vehicle to understand the internal structure of the performances and how they relate to each other, evolve from each other, and expand through each other.

 

Performances archived and reviewed (2000-2023):

 

o The Tunnel People

o Inserts in Real Time

o Proxy

o The Glass Wall

o The Notebook

o Forever

o All the Stories

o The Crowd

o The Messenger

o The Possible

o Coma

o The Kingdom

o The Black Veil

o One Minute Silence

o The Human Factor

o The Sphinx

o Heartbeaters

o Quarry Jeans

o The 60 Minute Zoom

o The Prophets

o Instant Narrative

o CCL, Cellule Cité Lénine

o Real and Fake (Drunk)

o The Game of Questions (A performance with printed matter)

o The Beggar’s Opera

o Rezos/Prayers

o Just Because Everything Is Different It Does Not Mean that Anything Has Changed: Lenny Bruce in Sydney

o What a Fucking Wonderful Audience

o The Romeos

o William Holden in Frankfurt

o Where Do Characters Go When the Story Is Over?

o The Artist Without Works: A Guided Tour Around Nothing

o Rehearsal/Retrospective

o Insulting the Audience

o Steal this Book

o Real Artists Don’t Have Teeth

o Best Regards from Charles Filch

o Locating Story

o Die Klau Mich Show

o News from Outside

o The Sinthome Score

o The Hearing Voices Café

o Imposed Words/Palabras impuestas

o Artificial Respiration

o Performance

o O interrogatõrio de uma mulher (The Interrogation of a Woman)

o Two Planets Have Been Colliding for Thousands of Years

o Translation/Exile

o The Drawing on the Floor: A Monologue

o The Labyrinth of Female Freedom

o Little object <a>

o Révolution,

o I libri sono corpi (possono essere smembrati)/ Books Are Bodies (They Can Be Dismembered)