Dance/Post-Dance and Contemporary Art: A One-Day Laboratory

tbc

Participants

Karin Bähler LavérManuel PelmuşStacey de VoeJosefine Wikström

It has been more than twenty years since Tino Sehgal represented Germany at the Venice Biennale with his white cube dancing gestures in This Is So Contemporary. Since then, dance has become an established component of contemporary art exhibitions, although its relationship to the visual arts has a much longer history, extending back to the 1960s and even the 1920s.

How might we understand the role of dance within contemporary art today? What conceptions of dance has emerged from the contemporary dance works presented in exhibitions and museums over recent decades? In what ways has dance become a use-value for contemporary artists working within a post-medium and post-conceptual condition? And what new perspectives on dance – including decolonial, ecstatic and ritualistic approaches – have been developed by artists, dancers and choreographers in recent years?

During this one-day laboratory, artists, curators and theorists will present their perspectives on these questions. The day will conclude with a round-table discussion.

Participants: Karin Bhäver Lavér, Manuel Pelmuş, Stacey de Voe, Josefine Wikström. More participants to be announced.

Venue: TBC

Date: 6^th of October 2026

Time: 9.30 am–4.00 pm

Contributors

Karin Bähler Lavér

Karin Bähler Lavér, currently residing in Malmö, curates exhibitions and facilitates conversations. She takes particular interest in art’s capacity to forge new modes of being-in-common, ways of worlding and cultivating the political imaginary. She runs the ambulating curatorial and editorial platform Skēnē.

Together with Asrin Haidari and Emily Fahlén she curated the 2020 Luleå Biennial: Time on Earth. Her most recent exhibitions are Bildningar with Emanuel Almborg at MINT konsthall, Stockholm, and Long Time Listener, First Time Caller with Susanna Jablonski at Kalmar konstmuseum (both 2021). She holds an MA in Cultural studies and critical theory from Malmö university (2023).

Manuel Pelmuş

Manuel Pelmuş is an artist with a background in choreography working across different contexts such as exhibitions, theaters and the public space. He often deploys continuous live presence, ongoing actions, within the context of exhibitions, using enactment as a performative strategy, the human body as a medium and the context of specific places and institutions, in order to challenge existing hierarchies and explore the body’s relationship to collective memory and the construction of history.

Stacey de Voe

Biography coming soon

Josefine Wikström

Josefine Wikström is a critic and researcher living in Gothenburg. Her research focuses on dance and performance in contemporary art from art philosophical and historically materialist perspectives. She is the author of the book Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score: A Critique of performance (2021), Objects of Feminism (2017 together with Maija Timonen); Kritik av konstens frihet (2022 together with Gustav Strandberg and Kim West) and Autonomins Sken: Om Kalliasbreven och frågan om estetikens politik hos Friedrich Schiller (2024 together with Gustav Strandberg and Kim West). She has been published in journals such as Radical Philosophy, Third Text, Performance Research Journal and Texte Zur Kunst. She writes regular dance critique for Dagens Nyheter and serves as one of the editors of the experimental philosophy- and art- platform SITE Zones. She works as a senior lecturer in the theory and practice of contemporary performative arts at the Academy of Music and Drama, at Gothenburg University.