Ibraaz is pleased to announce the remit for Platform 009, launching May 2015, which will investigate the following question:

What are the genealogies of performance art in North Africa and the Middle East?

Cynthia Zaven, Untuned Piano Concerto With Delhi Traffic Orchestra, 2006, performance, New Delhi. Photo by Michael Northam.

Platform 009 aims to be a research engine driven by artists who are working across forms, contexts and spaces to open up new artistic models and languages. Touching upon the edges of dance, film and video, performance writing, socio-political, activism and the emerging languages of the digital, it will map out a wide range of practices and theories associated with the labels 'performance', 'performance art' and 'performativity'.

Questions

1. Is performance art understood and received differently throughout the region? How is performance art even defined?

2. How do we document or compile a performance art history in the region and how do we draw relations, if at all, between movements?

3. How do we balance primary practice-based performance research alongside more scholarly work?

4. How does the weight/level/definition of performance differ between live, video and still/photography?

5. How do artists approach the question of gender in performance? Is it prescribed, reinforced, or transgressed?

6. How does race, class and sexuality disrupt and/or affirm these representations?

7. Who are the publics for performance art in the region?

8. How is the relationship to the public negotiated through performance, as public space becomes increasingly contested?

9. How do we consider the body and its co-engagement within the public domain?

10. How does performance, with its ephemeral nature, allow for more subversive, transgressive and/or political forms of public and institutional participation across the region?

11. What are the legacies, potencies and potential pitfalls of re-staging live performance via lecture, panel discussion, conversation, text and exhibition?

12. Where and under what conditions does performance art emerge today?