For the second year, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’s director Frédérique Bergholtz and curator Susan Gibb have been invited by LIMA to curate a screening programme from their rich collection of media artworks, that follows the thematic line ‘Performance’. Last year, they responded by bringing together a broad selection of works that spanned the historical scope of the collection to consider shifts in modes of performance that have occurred alongside, and in relation to, media arts development. This year, they will take a more focused view, zooming in on works that display an interest in object-invested performance practices.

Performance has often been posed as a challenge to objecthood through the ephemeral qualities of live action. This ephemerality is however something that media art intrinsically refutes by the very nature of its mediums’ abilities to record and document. Extending these propositions, this screening will highlight the co-existence and entanglement of objects and agents in complex networks of signification and exchange. It will do this by presenting a selection of works that consider the affordance of objects, meaning their possibilities for action, through them being performed on, with and responded to for each artists’ respective formal and subjective concerns. The screening will include seminal works by Judith Barry, Ulises Carrión, Swithan Dulaye, Terry Fox, Mona Hatoum, Nan Hoover, Servie Janssen, and Alison Knowles.

The focussed selection of the screening also responds to a resurgence of interest in the concept of the object across philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, and visual arts that was explored as part of If I Can’t Dance’s last Edition V—Appropriation and Dedication, and that will be extended in Edition VI.

This screening is part of the LIMA Collection 2015, which across five nights invites guest curators to present different (hi)stories of media art through thematic explorations of the LIMA Collection. The programme is supported by AFK.