Title:
The Sites of Performance and Global Art Geographies

Description:
Widrich will discuss performance art and its belated international audiences through photographic documents, reperformance, and, more ambitiously still, the way contemporary art hubs such as Singapore engage with regional and international audiences via performative means to fashion the image of an intellectually creative nation-state within a global economy. It follows that site specificity has to be reconsidered in an age of worldwide image circulation.

Speaker:
Mechtild Widrich is a scholar, curator, and current Assistant Professor in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work focuses on performance art and its mediation, art in public space, and the question of the public sphere, aesthetic theory, and global art geographies. Her book Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art was published with Manchester University Press in 2014. She has written in Grey Room, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Art Journal, The Drama Review (TDR), Performance Art Journal (PAJ), and Texte Zur Kunst and has edited books on Ugliness (London 2013), Participation in Art and Architecture (London 2015), and Presence (Berlin 2016), among others.