Performance Art Archives

Action Art / Live Art / Performance Art archives.

Beyond the books written about performance art, the papers, the conferences, the manifestos, there are people who collect and save, research and notate artists, their work, their stories. These performance art archives can be found around the world and may offer you a great resource for delving into artists work, focus, and motivations from around the world.

Performance Art Archives

  • The African American Performance Art Archive (aapaa.org) – US : makes crucial documentation of historically significant performances by African American artists available on-line to artists, scholars, and students in the spirit of intellectual exchange. I began the archive in order to apply the questions posed by performance artists to the study of art history.  In the process, I hope to give artists a greater voice in scholarly debate and explore what it means to study African American art.
  • Aggora8 – agora8 is a platform for collecting art documents and writings on art. Artists and authors are invited to submit documentation of realised and unrealised projects and a wide range of critical writings on art and artists. Publishing on agora8 gives you access to an internationally diverse audience who could not be physically present in the space and time of production.
  • Archivos en uso – Archivos en uso es un proyecto colectivo impulsado por distintos grupos de trabajo de la Red Conceptualismos del Sur y del “Grupo de Estudios sobre Arte, cultura y política en la Argentina reciente”, radicado en el Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires.
  • ArtPool – Budapest –
    • Artpool Art Research Center – Artpool Art Research Center is an avant-garde and contemporary art project and archive, founded in 1979 by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay in Budapest. Artpool’s mission is to document, archive, research, share, and present local and international art practices related to conceptual art, Fluxus, as well as to experimental tendencies and mediums …The unparalleled collection of the Artpool Art Research Center documents the history of art movements, trends and aspirations that emerged from the 1960s, including what is termed as unofficial artistic trends (underground, samizdat). The archives’ 650 running metres and 2,300 hours of digitalised material allows research into some 7,500 artists, art groups and institutes. Thanks to the documents and works it preserves, Artpool is an ideal place of research providing an insight into the intellectual developments of an era. The Artpool archives is a treasure trove of letters, descriptions of artworks, notes, sketches, concepts, interviews, various writings and works, as well as photo-documentation, catalogues, invitations, posters, bibliographies, chronologies, monographs, periodicals, diagrams, portfolios, video- and audio documents.
  • Centro de Documentación Arkheia, MUAC, UNAM – We aspire to build a reference collection of artistic practices in Mexico. Our collection works covers the period since 1952, the year the UNAM’s University City campus was founded, to the present, with special emphasis on work created post-1968. Our collection consists of works by more than 300 artists and is divided into two main bodies: the “Art Collection,” comprising works conceived in the fluctuating contexts of the art circuit, and the “Documentary Collection,” which comprises archives with materials of all kinds.
  • The Ashkal Alwan library – Beruit, Lebanon : The Ashkal Alwan archive ( aaarchive ) is an invaluable resource for any scholar, artist, and researcher with an interest in the history of contemporary art and discursive practices in the region. An open and active repository of knowledge sharing and research, aaarchive aims to activate Ashkal Alwan’s unique multimedia material as a space for discovering, learning, and sharing, at a moment of rising displacement among Arabic speakers.
  • Performance Matters – Archiving Performance – US –Performance Matters is officially launched with this special double-issue devoted to questions of performance archives and the “archival turn” in performance.
  • Performance Sources Performance Sources identifies and showcases performance artists in a constantly evolving archive, enriched with interviews, analyses, reflections and news. Performance Sources recounts and relays what performance has been like at a given time, in a given place, the Générateur, from 2006 to the present day. At the same time, it gradually opens up to new archive sources, with performances produced by Performance Sources partner venues, a network destined to expand over time. Archiving means categorizing and labeling works that, by their very nature, seek to escape formats, reproduction and expectations. How can we do this, if we want to make elusive works such as performances available to anyone, anywhere, at any time? This is the paradox on which Performance Sources was built.
  • Performing Archives/Archives of Performance (book) : Interdisciplinary and global in scope, Performing Archives/Archives of Performance investigates the relationship between live performance and recordings, bringing new—and productive—tensions between permanence and ephemerality into relief. Advancing theoretical understandings and analyzing specific artworks, performances, and archives, the contributors formulate new ways of understanding history, memory, enactment, and intervention, offering major contributions to ongoing critical discussions on performance and its disappearance and reproduction. 
  • Perforum (Switzerland) – Through our Archive and our regular Festival we want to support a historical and contemporary discussion about performance-art and related fields. Our archive is open to the public.
  • SALT – Research on Performance in Turkey 1984- 1999 Launched as part of Salt’s research into the history of art in Turkey, this web project focuses on performances realized in Turkey in 1984 to 1999. The website aims to present a comprehensive inventory of performances from the period in question and serve as a source of reference for further research on the trajectory of performance art in Turkey.The ongoing archival research has been conducted in light of interviews with participants and contributors to the performances. These accounts as well as the archives informed the inventory of works. Visual and textual sources, including photographs, video recordings, sketches, correspondences, posters and brochures from selected events, formed the basis of Salt’s The 90s Onstage exhibition. The archival materials compiled in this process were presented together for the first time in The 90s Onstage, chronicling individual and collective works that highlight performances. In parallel, Salt Research has initiated the process of cataloging and digitizing these archives to render them publicly accessible.
  • Sammlung Maria de Robe – The Maria de Robe Collection is a long-term project, initiated by Joël Verwimp, in order to develop a unique partnership with as many different museums as possible – from the Asian to the Fire Brigade Museum. On the one hand, a special connection between the institute (museum collection) and the audience (eyewitness) is to be created from the perspective of performance art. On the other hand, the collection of performance art beyond documentation procedures is put into practice. The ephemeral quality of performance art is therefore not understood here as immaterial, but the performative, common experience (publicness) is captured as materiality: Collecting life’s unknowns.
  • School of the Art Institute of Chicago – US : The John M. Flaxman Library is located at the physical and intellectual heart of the campus. Library staff collaborate with every program at the School to support teaching, learning and research across the entire curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Hundreds of thousands of books, magazines, movies and sound recordings are available on interdisciplinary topics
  • SerformanceP International Performance Art Exhibition Archives (São Paulo, Brazil) SerformanceP is a performance art exhibition created in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2015. With a focus on live art, video-performance, urban interventions, and digital experiments, the platform has received over 100 works by Brazilian and international artists.
  • Solyanka State Gallery, Russia :
  • Stedelijk Studies Issue #3 – Fall 2015 – The Place of Performance – Netherlands
  • Stedelijk Studies – Archives without a Lobby: On the Situation of Institutional Holdings in Galleries and Art Museums – Netherlands
  • Theatre & Performance Archives – The V&A’s Theatre & Performance Archives are the national collection of performing arts documenting current practice and the history of all areas of performing arts in the UK, including drama, dance, opera, circus, puppetry, comedy, musical theatre, costume, set design, pantomime, popular music and more.
  • UBUweb -Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. The site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists better known for other things. UbuWeb’s large, boundary-blurring archive of the avant-garde necessarily alters what is meant by avant-garde, a term saddled with the legacies of patriarchy, hegemony, imperialism, colonization, and militarization.
  • UMN Library performing art archive
  • Wayne state ENG5860 Creative Writing: Performance Art Archives & Collection
  • Wizya Vidéo Art Action (France) – archive

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