On April 4, 2018, we celebrated In Terms of Performance—the exhibition at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) that reimagines our web-based keywords anthology—presented in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley and BAM. The installation is on view through May 8, 2018 at the Peter Jay Sharp Building (30 Lafayette Ave, Brooklyn, NY).
Guests explored the installation’s text and interactive displays highlighting entries from the publication and BAM’s Hamm Archives. Visitors included publication contributors, curator Simon Dove, and composer Lisa Bielawa, whose entry on “Ephemerality” can be seen in the gallery.
The Center’s executive director, Paula Marincola, and BAM’s director of archives, Sharon Lehner, introduced the inspiration behind the collaborative exhibition, followed by three artist activations that responded to keywords such as “Documentation” and “Performativity.”
Obie Award-winning playwright/director/actor Ain Gordon shared an elegy to his childhood babysitter in a reading from his work Radicals in Miniature. Visual artist and 2016 Pew Fellow Sharon Hayes and theater artist Brooke O’Harra engaged the audience in a series of questions and an interpretation of text by filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Writer and artist Malik Gaines performed “And I am Telling You I’m Not Going” from the Broadway musical Dreamgirls, accompanied by projections of text on British philosopher J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts.
Intended to provoke discovery and generate shared literacies across disciplines, In Terms of Performance is a living anthology that continues to expand and features essays and interviews from more than 50 prominent artists, curators, presenters, and scholars who reflect on common yet contested terms in contemporary cultural practice.
In Terms of Performance at BAM transforms the web-based publication into a physical exhibition through interactive displays, text, video, and selected materials from the BAM Hamm Archives that illuminate and extend key points from the anthology’s web of reference. The exhibition is designed by Andrew LeClair.
