Vignettes from Performing Lives

Natasha Ginwala's presentation explores the narrations, site-making and knowledges produced through the performing body. She suggests that performance has always been part of oral and living practices, outside the climate we know as the globalised art circuit. Artists have drawn inspiration and learnings from the ways in which stories are told, dramatised and passed on through a spectrum of performance traditions.

Some of these practices are not codified in a time-bound reality, but rather endure over centuries in an improvised, lyrical and communal manner. How may contemporary performance methods draw on those embodied knowledge systems, which accompany us from birth to death, rather than being particular to just one moment? Giving examples of artistic practices she has engaged with, Ginwala presents the work of Wu Tsang and Boychild, who create affective modes of call and response, floating between the personal and collective; Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's approach to study and fugitive intelligence; Venuri Perera's investigations into border regimes, the temporality of ritual and uneven violence of the gaze; Nikhil Cophra, who asks how the body cites itself and how citations from the landscape enter the living body, revisiting the past and present through roleplay; and a procession featuring several artists at the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning.