Bookings: register at the Van Abbemuseum website

On 1 and 2 July, If I Can’t Dance is contributing to a workshop on performance art in the museum, as part of the symposium Questions to the Museum of the 21st Century at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.

Last year, as part of Play Van Abbe, If I Can’t Dance took over the Van Abbemuseum for an entire evening, night and morning. From Dusk Till Dawn included an exhibition, a performance programme, a radio broadcast, and a series of lectures by twenty internationally renowned artists and thinkers, including Keren Cytter, Jon Mikel Euba, Olivier Foulon, Suchan Kinoshita, Joachim Koester, Sarah Pierce, Peggy Phelan, and Lars Bang Larsen.

Inspired by the masquerade theme of Edition III, the programme aimed to explore the ‘flip side’ of the museum, or in other words, the museum’s reality ‘after hours’. If I Can’t Dance’s ongoing focus on performance and performativity, was the incentive for a curatorial approach that allowed for an investigation of the museum’s spaces as sites for performative presence. From Dusk Till Dawn was an ‘interruption’ in the Van Abbe’s current, long term critical research on the meaning of the institution of the museum and its collection in the 21st century. Read more about From Dusk Till Dawn here.

The symposium Questions to the Museum of the 21st Century marks the closing of Play Van Abbe, an 18 month long multifaceted programme working with and around the collection of the Van Abbemuseum. Art museums originate from the 19th century, Modern Art museums from the 20th century, now, at the break of the 21th century, the Van Abbemuseum asks itself what museum type will be born in this century.

Other contributors to the symposium are Zdenka Badovinac, Bart de Baere, Christiane Berndes, Claire Bishop, Manuel Borja-Villel, Charles Esche, Reesa Greenberg, Ysbrand Hummelen, Sven Lütticke, Hannah Hurtzig, Museum of American Art, Public Movement, Raum der Gegenwart – Kai-Uwe Hemken/Jakob Gebert and SUPERFLEX.