170542 UE How's My Dancing - Curating Dance and Performance in the Musem (2023S)

Since 2015, the ImPulsTanz Festival engages in an artistic collaboration with the mumok - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, which goes beyond the spatial ("dance in the museum") setting and enters into a dialogue with the current exhibitions. This resulted in seven ImPulsTanz performance programmes at the mumok curated by Chris Standfest and Karl Regensburger with around 200 artists; from intimate formats to a concert performance by Peaches, Keith Hennessy and workshop group in front of 3,000 people in the main courtyard of the MuseumsQuartier.
Curatorial approaches from the field of dance, choreography and performing arts in museums are examined. Their approaches and artistic languages, as well as their forms of mediation and practical requirements, are complex as well as topical - especially against the backdrop of current, crisis-like phenomena (not least a supposed "crisis of theatre") and the reinvention of museums between decolonisation, sustainability strategies and new forms of social inclusion. In the case of dance and choreography, the power and vulnerability of bodies and their agencies collide with an entirely differently organised form of representation of time, materiality and the agency of objects. This extremely productive field of tension is explored and thematically questioned (with regard to the gender aspects of embodiment, for example, but also in relation to transregional and historical contexts).

The "desire for the exhibition" as well as implementation strategies arise anew each year, depending on the concrete circumstances in the museum: from large-scale arrangements of immaterial works on screens ("Doppelleben - Bildende Künstler_innen machen Musik") to architecturally smaller-scale exhibitions ("Painting 2. 0.: Painting in the Information Age", "Feminist Avantgarde", "Pattern and Decoration"); a panorama of contemporary visual, choreographic and performing art practices develops from the use of the MQ courtyard or the Hofstallung to the programme in the empty White Cube in 2022. The diverse interweavings, not only on an artistic-material and aesthetic level, but also on the levels of production and practical institutional critique, communication and audience involvement, will be presented, jointly analysed and reflected on the basis of the ImPulsTanz programmes at the mumok. In parallel, the exercise accompanies the emergence of a new collaboration for summer 2023.
The aim is to articulate oneself in possibly unfamiliar artistic terrain and to discover connections and untranslatability between curatorial approaches and artistic works. We will explore, through artistic, curatorial and organisational experiences, the difficulties to be overcome and the conditions to be created in order to initiate artistic processes that enable critical, lively and precise transmedial encounters in museum spaces and open them up to diverse audiences.

The seminar will deal with the presentation of curatorial methods and their realisation. Material will include photographs, videos, programme and exhibition catalogues, the curator's theoretical positioning and experiences, and invitations from participating artists. In view of the collaborative nature of the artistic field, group work is a good way to explore selected themes, artistic works and programmes and present them to the seminar. The results will be discussed and reflected upon in plenary; at the end, a short text on an artistic production should be written, incorporating the discourses presented. Excursions to museums and visits to rehearsals or studios of Viennese artists offer practical insights into the processes of artistic work, as well as seminar visits by actors from the field.