Performance Day #2: The Museum performed

An event celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou

At La Ferme du Buisson and Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France
In association with the frac île-de-france and Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea.

Artists: Béatrice Balcou, Marcelline Delbecq & Ellie Ga, Ben Evans & Luís Miguel Félix, Ricardo Jacinto, Onze Heures Onze Orchestra, Pétrel | Roumagnac (duo), Kapwani Kiwanga, Catarina de Oliveira, Anouchka Oler, Projecto Teatral

Curators: Julie Pellegrin, Xavier Franceschi, Nathalie Giraudeau, Cristina Grande, Ricardo Nicolau, Pedro Rocha

Already a performance touchstone, Performance Day is spreading its wings as part of the Centre Pompidou’s 40th anniversary celebrations. Six international curators are joining forces for the programming of a festival combining the visual arts, theatre, film, music and literature, with a particular focus on the French and Portuguese scenes. Performance Day #2 is presenting around 15 artists, eight premieres, two exhibitions and Digressions, a new collection of conversations with artists.

In 2016 La Ferme du Buisson inaugurated Performance Day, an annual performance festival whose international programming would include curators from abroad with an emphasis on coproductions and freedom of movement for artists. Given artists’ growing interest in an interspace between the visual and the performing arts, our art centre is broadening its approach to include other sections of La Ferme du Buisson, and thus other resources, with a variety of projects involving the entire site: theatres, studios, outdoor spaces, the media library and so on. In this fundamentally multidisciplinary context these hybrid practices using performance as an active force in the transgression of boundaries find unequalled scope for experimentation. Deliberately concentrated into a single day, the festival will give visitors the chance to share a unique experience as they stroll from event to event and from space to space in a truly remarkable setting.

For Performance Day #2 the six curators will be looking into the topic of the museum performed: in practical terms how does a museum make history, what living memory does it build up, and what future is it modelling? To what extent does it contribute to a process of reification and at what point in time does it become a malleable object, transformed by historical, discursive, gestural and fictional sedimentations? Since the 1960s and 1970s artists have been constantly challenging the museum as institution: its representational codes and dominant forms of rhetoric, its capacity to reify and standardise, its modes of exhibition and dissemination, its relationship with archives and collections, and the role it assigns to viewers and transmission.

Today a whole generation of artists is revitalising what used to be called “institutional criticism” via alternative narratives that are allowing subjective, minority and subaltern voices to be heard. At once poetic and political, their proposals grant pride of place to the invisible and the intangible, and to receptivity and attentiveness. Via interpersonal give and take, talks, guided tours, handling of objects and musical and theatrical interpretations, artists are performing singular stories of museums and art collections.

Details on lafermedubuisson.com

Download press kit

Related exhibitions:

SoixanteDixSept (SeventySeven)
In the framework of Centre Pompidou’s 40th anniversary celebration throughout France, three key contemporary art venues in Seine-et-Marne, France’s département no. 77, recall the emblematic date—1977—of the opening of the Centre Pompidou, that “power plant for decentralisation,” and renew the spirit of an era on a broad territorial scale.

–Ferme du Buisson Centre for Contemporary Art – Noisiel / When Rossellini filmed the Centre Pompidou 
–Île-de-France Regional Contemporary Art Collection, (FRAC), le château/Parc culturel de Rentilly-Michel Chartier –Bussy-Saint-Martin / Hôtel du Pavot…
–Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France – Pontault-Combault / Experiment