In recent decades, the visual arts have witnessed an unprecedented development of performative practices. This has brought about both a heated academic and institutional debate about the notion of performance and the phenomenon of performativity – in relation both to ways of presenting performance in the exhibition space and to the problem of creating museum collections made up of performance works. This publication gathers the results of the many years of research work of the collection curators and performance scholars associated with the museum confederation L’Internationale aiming to address the following question: why museums should collect performance? The issue of how ...

Following the attacks on the creators of the controversial satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, the shootings at a debate on free speech in Copenhagen, the punishment of the rights activist and blogger Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, and the subsequent massive civil mobilisation, the cultural field is forced to process the significance of these events and their wider implications for our work. In Paris and many other instances across continents, representation itself came under attack. Arguably, the field of representation has been in crisis for some time, yet the current context demands that we consider this crisis from ...

The editorial board began discussing this e-publication in the aftermath of summer 2015. The decision to put together this fifth edition, titled “Subjects and Objects in Exile”, was prompted by the many tragic displacements, fates and deaths of those seeking asylum in Europe and elsewhere. These enforced mass exiles are the result of civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The appalling and dehumanising management by European powers is having worrying economic, cultural, political and juridical implications. In this publication, we would like to address what has come to be called, not un-problematically we would argue, the European “refugee crisis”. ...