Presentations Institutional Genealogies

Institutional Genealogies is a one-day programme of reflections on how performance art and art institutions influence each other today.

Before lunch

The Guided Tour (moving image work, 2024)
Maren Dagny Juell 

The Guided Tour is an animated film in the speculative fiction genre, exploring the interpretation and value of objects. It takes place in a museum in the future, where humanity is scrutinised and misunderstood. Building on previous works, such as A Monument for a Sim Inventory (2023) and Human Resource the Musical (2023), Maren Dagny Juell explores game engine tools and AI to create a tale of object-making. The ‘song’ is produced by a glitch in text-to-speech software that fails to interpret a series of letters in sequence (aaaa e.g.). 

Welcome and introduction 
Håkon Lillegraven 

The Restless Museum 
Hendrik Folkerts 

Emerging from an ongoing correspondence with artist Cally Spooner around the terms of performance in contemporary art today, curator and art historian Hendrik Folkerts speaks about exhibition-making as anchored in the practice of performance, choreography, and dramaturgy. In recent years, Folkerts has curated such exhibitions as Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product (2024-2026, at Moderna Museet, Gropius Bau, and MoMA PS1), Mike Kelley, Ghost and Spirit (2025, at Moderna Museet, in collaboration with Tate Modern), and Seven Rooms and a Garden: Rashid Johnson and Moderna Museet’s collection (2023-2024, at Moderna Museet), building a language around the “restless museum,” a space in which vocabularies around performance is paired with the notion of radical hospitality towards situated, contingent, and, ultimately, a/live curatorial practice.  

Fluxing the Modern: The Silverman Fluxus Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, New York 
Alison Burstein

In the late 1950s, artists affiliated with Fluxus began developing experimental approaches to art making that confronted and reconfigured core tenets of modernism, yielding intermedia works that are inherently performative, iterative, and interactive. This presentation investigates the tensions that emerge when such unruly, ever-fluctuating artworks meet the rigid institutional structures of museums historically grounded in modernist principles. Centering on the example of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 2008, the talk examines how the collection’s defining characteristics have prompted curators, conservators, and other museum professionals to reevaluate and evolve traditional methodologies across several registers—from the criteria used to organize objects into medium-specific departments and the protocols of collection care and management to models of display, interpretation, and programming. 

Acquiring an immaterial work inhabited by spirits  
Lotte Løvholm

In her presentation Lotte Løvholm from The Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde (Museet for samtidskunst Roskilde) in Denmark will present the current acquisition process of Agersjæle og Grødegejster (Ghosts of Growth, Spirits of the Field) (2022) by artist Sidsel Bonde. The work consists of a 1000-year-old plaiting technique revitalized by Sidsel who wishes to spread the handcraft to pay gratitude and respect for the soil and its resources. Plaiting the last of a field crop was thought to offer the spirits of the field a winter abode, usually hung in local community places and village halls, whence they could pass growing power back to the field and ensure a good harvest the following year. The museum has acquired the responsibility of carrying on this tradition and craft.

After lunch

The Performance Problem: Caring for the Ephemeral in a Concrete World 
Jina Chang

Performance art forces museums to rethink their core mission. Chang will briefly introduce the practical and philosophical challenges involved in collecting and caring for art that exists in time, not just in space. The presentation will frame the fundamental dilemmas of conservation and transmission faced by museums designed for the permanent and the tangible, preparing us for the conservator's firsthand experience.

Recalibrate! The Conservation of Choreographic Artworks at Tate. 
Ana Ribeiro

In this presentation Ana will build on the learning and reflection the Tate time-based media conservation team have been developing as part of the research project ‘Precarious Movements’. By talking through the experience of activating A Sun Dance by Rochelle Haley at Tate St Ives in 2024, she will be unpicking the relationship between how choreographic work is encountered in the museum and the constant processes of exchange and (re)calibration that unfold.

Rethinking the Collection: Disability-led Performance in the Museum 
Saša Asentić

Asentić will discuss his practice of accessibility-centered work that questions the relationship between visitors and works of art in museums and expand the very understanding of the concept of a collection through live performance and disability perspectives. He will present different examples of disability-led performative actions considered as temporary immaterial collections in museums and elaborate on their transformative potential in relation to the role of museums today.

Rendering Grounds  
Kjersti Solbakken

The presentation explores performance as a means to question and reconfigure the structures that shape cultural institutions, redefining how art is experienced and turning spaces of display into sites of dialogue, embodiment, and collective imagination. Through curatorial and artistic examples—including projects at Bergen Kunsthall and from Solbakken’s work as curator of the Lofoten International Art Festival 2024—it examines how performative acts can recast the institution from a fixed system into a living, negotiable space shaped by those who engage with it. Centering on acts of doing rather than representation, the presentation suggests how presence, participation, and collaborative practice can redistribute power and render institutions more responsive, porous, and accountable.

The Performance of a Museum During a Genocide 
Helle Siljeholm

In this presentation, visual artist, choreographer, and PhD researcher Helle Siljeholm leads a participatory session exploring how a museum—specifically the National Museum—can be understood as a performance in its own right. Within the context of genocide, how does the museum’s performance or non-performance become visible? Are we, the public, witnessing rhetoric or policy as a performance strategy?

The Commodification of Dissent: institutional earnestness and the order of the audience 
Mijke van der Drift and Nikhil Vettukattil

In this talk Mijke van der Drift and Nikhil Vettukattil respond to the encapsulation of performance by institutional frames and audience expectation. Tracing back lineages of capture, Nikhil and Mijke find coloniality at the heart of the gentrification of the potential of performance. The talk culminates in a proposal for shifting out of the reduction of performance to expectation and theorisation.

Respondents 
Ifrah Osman, Manuel Pelmuš

On the background of their curatorial and artistic work, Ifrah Osman and Manuel Pelmuš have been invited to observe the programme and generate notes and feedback to the project curators and team.