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FaVU-1UdPUAcad. year: 2026/2027
This course approaches performance as a historically changing, situated, material-discursive practice. Rather than treating performance solely as an autonomous artistic genre, it examines how relations, identities, memory, and power are organised through bodies, voices, movement, objects, images, spaces, institutions, audiences, and technologies. The history of performative art will therefore not be approached as a linear history of a genre, but as a critical field in which performance takes place under specific social, material, institutional, and media conditions.
Alongside historical orientation in performative art, the course develops a critical vocabulary for analysing embodiment, gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, labour, care, spectatorship, participation, and the institutional conditions of artistic production. Attention will be paid to live events as well as their mediation and documentation, collective reading, the development of students’ interpretive skills, and independent research or artistic projects. Teaching combines contextual lectures (45–60 minutes) with close reading of texts and close viewing of artworks, including follow-up seminar discussions (30–45 minutes).
In the winter semester, the course focuses on the genealogies of performative art from the historical avant-gardes, happening, and Fluxus through Czechoslovak situational, conceptual, and action-based practices to feminist, queer, decolonial, participatory, and site-responsive approaches. These will be examined through selected artworks, records, manifestos, artists’ texts, and theoretical studies. One theme of this overview will be the dynamic relationship between live event, document, and archive as mutually constitutive practices, including the performative character of documentation and archival work.
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Entry knowledge
No prior knowledge is required. Students are expected to be willing to work with scholarly texts and actively participate in collective discussion.
Rules for evaluation and completion of the course
Credit requirements:
– A minimum of 80% active attendance.
– One presentation of a developing topic during the semester.
– A written assignment (an analysis of a selected artwork or project) of approximately 1,500 to 2,000 words; the assignment will be specified by agreement during the semester.
Aims
The aim of the course is for students not only to situate performance historically, but also to analyse it as a relational event embedded in specific social, institutional, and media conditions. Studeints will:
– Gain a basic orientation in key concepts and historical phases of performative art, from the avant-gardes to contemporary networked and post-digital practices.
– Develop the ability to analyse performance in relation to body, gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, labour, audience, institution, space, and media.
– Become familiar with documentation, the performative function of documents, archiving, and curatorial approaches to performance.
– Be able to use gained knowledge and experiences to improve articulated formulation of one’s own artistic, research, or curatorial practice.
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Seminar
Individual preparation - study of technical texts
Individual preparation - preparing a written work