Opening Salon: Performance in Contemporary Art

Enjoy compelling conversations with performing artists, curators and academics in a relaxed atmosphere. More names will be added to the salons, keep an eye on the website!

To open Performatik19, Tate Modern performance curator Catherine Wood discusses her recently published book Performance in Contemporary Art with artist Jimmy Robert.

• Catherine Wood was instrumental in founding the performance programme at Tate in 2003 and has since curated more than two hundred live works, both at the museum and within the online space Performance Room which she initiated in 2011. As Senior Curator, International Art (Performance), Wood works on performance projects, exhibitions, collections, having been critical in the acquisition of works by Joan Jonas, Tino Sehgal and Suzanne Lacy among many others, and displays at Tate Modern, as well as being actively engaged in research.

• Born in Guadeloupe, Jimmy Robert currently lives in Berlin. He is a graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London and the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam). He has exhibited at Tate Britain and WIELS, and presented performances at Performa 17, Playground 2015, and others. Jimmy Roberts has been featured in the Performatik programme twice before, in 2011 and 2013.

• Daniel Blanga-Gubbay is a researcher in political philosophy and performance based in Brussels. After graduating in philosophy from the Venice University of Architecture with Giorgio Agamben, and while working with him, he got a European Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, jointly run by the University of Palermo, Valencia and Freie Unversität Berlin). He currently teaches Political Philosophy for the Arts at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels and he is the founder of Aleppo, a space for researches in political philosophy in collaboration with art institutions. He worked for the Kunstenfestivaldesarts as dramaturg (2015-2017) and was appointed – together with Sophie Alexandre and Dries Douibi – as co-director in 2018.