Tanzquartier Wien

Permanent Collection is an ongoing live-action intervention, constructed around the notion of a permanent collection. The work is enacted by a group of performers who transform and re-mediate art-historical references, cultural artifacts, contexts, events, texts and gestures using only the body as a medium. Enactment is used as a performative strategy which delves into the context of specific places and institutions, moving freely between strict classifications and notions of ownership, alluding to the possibility of an embodied, commonly shared heritage. For this reason, Pelmuș envisaged a protocol of collaboration by means of linking entities and spaces as part of an effort to co-create and at the same time experience a constellation of memories, affects and knowledge: At Kunsthalle Wien, Permanent Collection is performed continuously for four hours each day. Simultaneously, a dancer will also perform Permanent Collection at the Museum of Public Transportation in Timișoara, Romania. Literally moving together. Although there is no visible link between the two spaces, the knowledge that emanates from their shared movements connects audiences from the two cities, thus opening up a territory of participation and placing the performers and public in a fluid, open-ended alliance, co-present in a time-space that is both imaginary and real.

For this iteration, Permanent Collection proposes many instances of the body as a site of resilience and agency and embodies the political idea that, while one acts alone, the act is always animated by the production of others, even if they do not share the same time or place. This new ongoing live-action intervention explores the possibility of a performative, collectively constructed permanent collection by means of a movement-based practice, which is usually associated with ephemerality. It thus challenges the dogma of the material collection and it underscores the impermanent nature of what is deemed permanent in the museum context, as this notion has been forged by Western museological conventions, partly based on the need to preserve plundered artefacts in order to establish canonical representations of world art and the history thereof.

The choice of location also reflects the artistic concept: The ongoing live-action intervention is installed in Kunsthalle Wien’s ground floor gallery and in the semi-public hallways and in-between spaces shared by several institutions and which lead to the entrance of Kunsthalle Wien. The visitors can spend as much time as they want with the work, being able to leave and to come back any time. There is no beginning and no end.

In cooperation with Kunsthalle Wien