Left Performance Histories

Left Performance Histories at The neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) in Berlin, (3 February - 25 March 2018), was a research-led group exhibition co-curated by Bodor with five other scholars from the international Action Art Beyond the Iron Curtain Network. It presented 25 Eastern European artists working across art, fashion and theatre, whose works around gender and constructive critical engagement with state socialist ideas are under-represented in normative critical and historical narratives of art.

The curators juxtaposed well-known and newly discovered artworks to resist conventional geographical or chronological presentation and encourage new readings, involving the spouses of late performance artists Mladen Stilinović and Tomislav Gotovac as guest curators of individual artworks to give examples of how familial ‘archivists’ shape histories of performance art. Informed by Bodor’s research into curating dematerialised art, the exhibition presented relics, documents and recollections together as an expanded materiality of historical works, embodying a re-examination of interpretation through the methodology of new materialist thinking in contemporary curatorial practice.

The two-year research underpinning the exhibition was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, including group visits to archives and interviews with artists active since the 1970s in Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Serbia. The exhibition itself was hosted and funded by nGbK, attracting over 6,000 visitors. Reviews have been published internationally, including in CAA, Blok Magazine, ArtPortal, Revista Magazine.

The symposium and event programme, co-organised by Bodor, included new performance commissions (Judit Kele, Bálint Szombathy and Vlasta Delimar), artist talks (Ewa Partum and Jürgen Hohmut), and panel discussions extending the research to wider global discourses on art, gender and politics. The bilingual (English and German) publication (published by nGbK, 2018), co-edited by Bodor, includes exhibition documentation and newly commissioned texts.