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This paper approaches the emergence, over the 20th century, of a public architecture that occupies sights/sites once associated with industry and social alienation, in this case the conversion of London’s Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern Art Museum. Utilising Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary theories on performance, the celebrated architecture of Herzog and De Meuron is investigated alongside ‘Double Bind’, an installation by the late Spanish artist Juan Muñoz whose work highlights the quality of isolation in the contemporary metropolis. In investigating architecture and installation, a space is opened up between the art and architecture revealing a performativity that engages with 20th century trauma and the crisis of the modern. This spatial dynamic forms an architecture of alienation where the participants are estranged from the environment, rendering them strangers, even within familiar environments ... tourists in their own land.

This article addresses the performative dimension of the post-1989 Polish memorial culture of the Holocaust, characterised by a collaborative and audience-participatory model of remembering the Jewish victims. In this model participants are invited to become creators and owners of public memory, rather than silent observers or witnesses to commemorations performed by others. The article offers a critical and theoretical understanding of performativity in Holocaust commemoration through the examples of educational memorial actions Listy do Henia (‘Letters to Henio’) and Kroniki sejneńskie (‘The Sejny Chronicles’) led by the Polish grassroots institutions Ośrodek Brama Grodzka (‘Grodzka Gate-NN Theatre Centre’) in Lublin and Ośrodek Pogranicze (‘Borderland Foundation’) in Sejny. Drawing mainly on Polish perspectives on memory, the article examines the aesthetic and ethical value of these actions. It further probes how a performative model of engagement can serve to expose the complex past of Polish–Jewish relations, to bring the historical past vividly into current consciousness, and to facilitate a sense of belonging to a moral community of memory among younger generations of Poles.

In all Upper and Lower Sorbian grammars, aspect is a grammatical category, regarded a typical “Slavic” traitin spite of the fact that since Bermel 1994, aspect can be safely said to have evolved separately in the individual Slavic languages. The character of aspect in Sorbian, especially in Upper Sorbian, is highly disputable (and has been disputed since the beginning of the 20th century (cf. Werner 2003). An exception to one of the rules of Slavic aspect (namely that something happening at the time of talking must be expressed by means of an imperfective verb) are the so-called perfomative verbs. This acceptance and the termAktverben go back to Koschmieder 1929 but have never been thoroughly verified for individual verbs in the Sorbian languages. In this paper, the author makes an attempt at shedding some light on the aspect usage of performative verbs in Upper Sorbian.

This paper proposes a new methodology for practice-as-research: “Anticipation, Action, and Analysis”. Critical evaluation of my performance artwork Lost for Words functions as the vehicle to describe Anticipation, Action, and Analysis and to theorise, articulate and demonstrate how slapstick can offer useful insights into the operations of the physical body in participative art performance that go beyond abstract theorisation. Scrutinising and examining slapstick’s performativity in relation to the subject of participation (Bourriaud 1998; Bishop 2006) within Performance Art, this paper concentrates discussion on my performance Lost for Words (2011) as a performance that by making use of slapstick as an extreme physical bodily interruptive process, really supports the problems and difficulties involved in participation within Performance Art. My definition of slapstick in this performance relates to undertaking a set of actions which forces participants’ bodies to interrupt how it normally behaves. The paper achieves this by addressing what happens when, as part of the structural framework of the performance, interruptive processes related to bodily incongruity and repetition (Heiser, 2008) are engineered into activities undertaken by participants engaging in physical and bodily processes. Defining the term collectivity as meaning being a member of a group of people with possibly shared experiences, interests and motivations, the paper also amplifies consideration of how the performance can be used to provide useful insights into the importance that collectivity and conviviality (Bourriaud 1998; Clayton 2007) plays within participatory processes. By way of contrast, the paper explores how the anti-social nature of Schadenfreude (Glenn 2003; Miller, 1993; Svendsen 2010 et al.) can also play its part as well as the, as argued, contradictory nature of hospitality (Derrida 2000) in examining how the performer and audience relation can be construed as host/guest.

The following article is an autoethnographic reading of carnival as an inter-cultural and interpersonal event, and one that does not always profit from anthropological models such as inversion or safety-valve theories. The radical proximity of carnival experience destroys the objectivity of the event and makes it meaningful mainly as a lived-in moment. The following is an account of an individual experience that defines the significance of carnival as a form of kinesis, the shaking up of the static ethnographic "I"; an (un)expected humping. My case-study is the Pyrenean carnival of Bielsa in Spain, and my theoretical ideonauts are Mikhail Bakhtin and Judith Butler. The analysis of their concepts of dialogism and performativity lead to a series of complex anthropological questions regarding the meaning and doing of social and cultural events.

This article develops and narrates concepts of participant-spectator encounters with place, as outcomes of the practice-led-research performances of Promenade Locale. The Promenade Locale series was performed over three consecutive years from 2014-2016, in a regional country town in Australia. Following on from the ‘mis-guided tours’ of Wrights & Sites, the author/performer embodies the persona of Ms Guide, to take participants on night tours. Methods of the performance making and live process are discussed, which aimed to provoke participants to engage with aspects of their own town in an altered and potentially more dynamic way. Addressing themes of participation and performativity Promenade Locale worked to divert audience members from the normal experience of their own town and offer up new imaginings delivered through tactile tasks and an improvised textual score. In the opening introduction, Ms Guide invites the participants to interject, interrupt and take the lead at any point on the tour. The outcomes of the project are detailed in the article through a reflective and critical response to both the real time event and questionnaire feedback.

There is a growing commitment within cultural institutions such as museums and galleries to develop exhibitions that attract the public to engage with art. Digital technological innovations play an important role in this regard, enabling visitors to experience artworks in new ways. Contemporary museums and galleries have become increasingly concerned with promoting public engagement through the consumption of interactive installations, as opposed to the traditional approach of housing static curiosities and authentic pieces. In this article, I will explore the visitors’ responses to the technologically mediated artworks and the new forms of interaction(s) that arise in exhibition areas. The changed forms of interaction are twofold: participation with artworks creates interaction with the exhibit as well as with fellow visitors and members of staff. These new forms of interactions are linked to the individuals’ performance and thereafter to their subjective experience of the art exhibition. This article approaches the museum visit from a sociological perspective in order to find out what exactly happens in interactive digital exhibitions. The analysis addresses the ways in which these different forms of interactions affect the experience of visiting a museum, as well as perceptions of the arts and culture.

This text is a project presentation of work in progress. The objective is to introduce an alternative analytical approach to university museum collections as a phenomenon. This endeavour has been motivated by our experiences of the dynamic and multiple practices and versions of collections by these museums, rather than of the collections as static and uniform. Based on an approach inspired by ontological politics, we analyse the university museum collection as a result of different enactments rather than as a homogeneous entity that either just is, either passively observed or strategically and/or competitively constructed. These theoretical reflections, in addition to observations made in an initial empirical study of practices at a university museum, indicate the need to acknowledge the coexistence of several parallel versions of the university museum collection as expertise performance. This allows for the understanding of the university museum collection as multiple, and the second phase of this project will consist of analysis of relationships between various simultaneous practices and versions.

The horsewhip is an interesting object. It works in relationships between animals and humans. In some relationships it can make the horse move forward willingly, with no need for physical contact. In other contexts, the whip can make the horse obey the rider’s wishes by gently touching the horse’s body. In other kinds of relationships, it paves the way for riders hitting their horses and also feeling regret afterwards. This article combines insights from two recent research fields – research focusing on materiality and research focusing on the relationship between animals and humans. Research in these fields challenges museum presentations of these topics. The article adopts a performative perspective regarding the whip and its relations and shows how whips, horses and riders are constituted in different practices. Finally, the museum communication of such practices is commented on. The aim is to show how a museological perspective regarding objects and materiality can contribute to the understanding of the importance of seeing objects as relational materialities, as well as to knowledge about the relationship between animals and humans.