Some thoughts on immediacy and site specificty

This narrated visual essay will explore a series of continuous projects and actions whose fluid modes of operation and politics of translation relentlessly alter, disrupt, and shape notions of immediacy and site specificity. As part of an ongoing reflection, this sketch of pulsing movements, gestures close and far away, graphic words, drawn out lines, and incisions in space is fueled by the question how the performativity of agency, desire, and memory can establish—and transcend—the frameworks of a form we call the present.

Barbara Clausen is an independent curator and Professor for art history at the University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM). Since 2000 she has lectured and written extensively on the historiography and institutionalization of performance-based art practices (After the Act: The (Re)presentation of Performance Art, 2006) and the parallel discourses surrounding the politics of the body and the archive. She has over the last ten years curated numerous exhibitions and performance series in Europe as well as North America and is currently the Curatorial Research Director of the Joan Jonas Knowledge Base for The Artist Archives Initiative at New York University.