Talks and Panels

Between Body and Space: Performance in Contemporary Art

Moderation: Lisa Beißwanger
Guests: Ellen Blumenstein, Lisa Moravec, Frederike Sperling, Clara Wörsdörfer

The panel is dedicated to current issues and themes in performance art and reflects on the multifaceted performance program of “Body and Building. Two Evenings, Two Days (of Performances)”. The focus will be on the relationship between body and building or space, which determines performance art in exhibition contexts in a particularly special way.

The performance festival integrates dance, music, theater, poetry and sculpture as well as talks and discussions about an art form that has become an integral part of the present.

Lisa Beißwanger is a Junior Professor of Science of Art and Art History at the University of Koblenz. Her research focuses on the art and architecture of the 20th century, with a particular focus on performance art, museum and exhibition history and educational architecture. Her book Performance on Display – Zur Geschichte lebendiger Kunst im Museum was published by Deutscher Kunstverlag in 2021.

Ellen Blumenstein is an author and curator. Until 2022, she led the IMAGINE THE CITY program in Hamburg, which realized projects in an urban context at the interface of culture and urban development. She is currently an Associate Curator for the Spreepark Art Space in Berlin. Most recently, she published texts on the Oslo MUNCH Museum by Estudio Herreros Madrid (Lambda Files, Spector Books, 2023) and on Raphael Sbrzesny’s queer-performative practice in the exhibition catalog The Cast (Hirmer Publishing, 2025).

Lisa Moravec is an art historian/performance scholar, critic, and curator. She conducts research on interdisciplinary forms of contemporary performance in the visual and performing arts, with a focus on human, animal, and machine intersections and differences. She leads the FWF project The Performance of Critique: AI, Bodily Intelligence, and Posthumanist Aesthetics (FWF/Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien, 2025-28).

Frederike Sperling is the Artistic Director of Kunstraum Niederoesterreich in Vienna. In this role she has worked on new commissions, performative exhibitions as well as live and discursive events. In the past she was program director at Kunstverein das weisse haus and curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21).

Clara Wörsdörfer is an art historian and research assistant at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation Allan Kaprow’s Activities. Intimacy and Sociality in the Art of the 1970s was published as a monograph by De Gruyter in 2023.