While Retrospective and Expo Zero treat time as an important factor, for many other live exhibitions it seems to be more of an accessory. Although Obrist voices his interest in time, a closer look at his time-based curating suggests that the true potential of liveness is rather neglected. 11 Rooms, which he curated together with Klaus Biesenbach, is an exhibition that places 11 live artworks inside 11 white cubes. The performances are clearly framed as artworks, like objects in a rather old-fashioned exhibition. The shows ran all day long, but the viewing arrangement was demanding. Perhaps this is because the time visitors spent watching the exhibition was longer than the famous 30 seconds devoted on average to each artwork in most exhibitions. Yet no attempt was made to create a durational experience for the audience, or even for the performers. Conventional exhibitions are durational because that is what the classic exhibition format requires. The focus of Obrist and many of the artists he works with is not on creating artworks made of people, but on replacing objects with people. This approach is mostly sculptural or spatial; the material is people. Or, as Obrist puts it on his website: “11 Rooms is like a sculpture gallery where all the sculptures go home at 18.00.”

But time is a more powerful tool than that, as shown by postdramatic theater, which ultimately replaces the fictional drama time of dramatic theater with real time and insists on creating a situation rather than representing one. Although theater in this understanding may well include a story, fiction, imagination, dramaturgical arcs and the like, it cannot be defined through them. It is defined by the creation of a temporarily shared reality. And this is a great opportunity for performative curating.

Curating as Public Space

Theater has long been the space in which societies explore their own tools, procedures, ideals and limits. As Hannah Arendt noted in The Human Condition (1958), “The art of politics is the best of its kind; there is only the political space transferred into art.” Carrying this legacy into the field of curating – at a time when presumed political certainties are collapsing and our democracies are constantly under threat – poses an enormous challenge to putting it into practice. Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic pluralism, which seeks to bring out different positions in struggle and dissent, for example in The Democratic Paradox (2000), allows us to think of democracy as a public space that permits the possibility of conflict. Just as the curatorial can be thought of as performative, the concept of agonistic pluralism looks almost like theater written in other words. It is no coincidence that Mouffe derived this term from “agon,” the Greek word for contest. On a small scale, theatrical and curatorial concepts can create such open spaces of exchange in societies with little freedom of expression, or even in Western democracies, where the gap between consensus and antagonism keeps narrowing. The distinction drawn by art theorist Miwon Kwon in One Place After Another (2002) may be one of the most important contributions of performative curating: art not in public space, but as public space.

To give an example from my own work, Truth is Concrete was a rather ambitious project that we realized as the curatorial team of Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria, in September 2012. The starting point was the strong impression made by the role of artists in political upheavals around the world, as well as the question of what role artistic strategies could play in such situations. Conceived long before the Occupy movement began and taking place shortly after its first anniversary, the Truth is Concrete marathon brought together more than 200 artists, activists and theorists. Alongside 100 students and young professionals, a local and international audience took part, meeting in a shared space of art and activism. Running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the marathon comprised a 170-hour program of lecture-performances bringing together useful strategies and tactics in art and politics.

Sometimes very fast, sometimes very slow, the marathon machine kept running, producing discussion and knowledge, but also frustration and exhaustion. It used time as a tool for creating an extreme social experience. But in doing so, was it not holding up a mirror to the neoliberal agenda? The truth is that Truth is Concrete was aimed in the opposite direction. This machine did not set a task that could be completed. It could not easily be commodified, nor easily consumed. There was no right time, and it was not built around highlights. So there was not just one marathon but many individual marathons; having to miss things was part of having to make choices. Truth is Concrete was concerned not only with the intellectual intensity it generated. It was also concerned with the effect of this encounter on our bodies, in the moment.

Running at the center was as tough as a marathon. Surrounded by a camp-like living and working environment, it was a social space with its own needs and timing: a community, created for just one week, in which night blended into day and which lived its own jet lag, independent of the outside world. Through daily workshops, various durational projects and an exhibition, the vertical movement of the marathon machine was embedded in a horizontal structure of openness. Most important of all, however, was the spontaneous content that the participants created within this open marathon by organizing themselves.

Knowing and Not Knowing

If performative curating creates a social situation within a framework, then the production and exchange of knowledge become key issues. In recent years, many approaches have been developed that combine knowledge production with performative tools and formats, creating theatrical conferences, choreographed panels and staged lectures. In particular, “Go Create TM Resistance” (2002-2005), a series focusing on art and activism at Schauspielhaus Hamburg by academics such as Sibylle Peters, Stefanie Wenner and Gesa Ziemer and curator Matthias von Hartz, created formats for choreographed panels and staged lectures. Unfriendly Takeover & Multitude e.V’s Dictionary of War (2006-2007), or the performative conference I prepared for Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, Appropriations (2014), can also be said to belong to this strand.

Probably the best known and most influential work in the field of artistic and curatorial knowledge projects, however, is Hannah Hurtzig’s installations for the distribution of knowledge; in her work, in theory and in practice, content and form have become almost inseparable. Her website, for instance, describes The Kiosk for Useful Knowledge, which she developed together with curator Anselm Franke, who originally comes from theater, as “the construction of public spaces that experiment with new narrative forms for the production and mediation of knowledge.” Professional knowledge and theoretical discourse meet individual narratives. The distribution of knowledge becomes tangible for a spectator who is at once a voyeur and the witness of an almost intimate conversation. Two protagonists share their expertise in the form of a personal narrative, and we can take part in it through image and sound. This principle was also applied in the performance Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge. In this performance, some 50-100 experts sat at small tables, creating half-hour sessions in which they sold their expert knowledge in return for 1 Euro. From scientists to artists, from hairdressers to fortune-tellers, they shared insights and information about facts, experiences, self-help or fields of knowledge entirely unknown to you. All of it depended on the person passing it on. In this way, Hurtzig also pointed to the performative character of knowledge transfer.

This example, like many others collected in the second part of the book, highlights in one way or another the potential of a curatorial approach that uses the performative as a tool for creating discursive spaces. They combine both aspects of the term performativity: they become partly theater-like in order to curate reality-creating situations using the tools, strategies and methodologies of the live arts. This social, even political practice takes the possibilities of curating even further.

In his book The Empty Space (1968), theater director Peter Brook tells the story of some children in Mexico at a time before the wheel had been invented. “Gangs of slaves had to carry huge stones through the jungle and over the mountains, while their children pulled their toys on tiny rollers.” The parents did not realize that the wheels they used when making toys for their children could in fact be a far more powerful tool. They could not make that connection. Brook used this image to show that theater can be regarded as a lovely entertainment, a toy. But in fact it can be much more: a way of moving things. Perhaps we, too, as programmers of theater, dance, performance and music, still do not fully understand that the wheel of performance we constantly watch in theater, choreography and performance is too powerful a tool to leave unused.