Panelists:
Dan Pon (grunt gallery) Vancouver, Canada
Jehan Roberson (formerly Hemispheric Institute) New York, USA
Lois Keidan (formerly Live Art Development Agency) London, UK
Elaine Lin (Asia Art Archive) Hong Kong, China

Moderated by Laura Levin (Associate Professor, Theatre & Performance Studies, York University)

As part of the solo exhibition Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective, AGYU is pleased to host this live-streaming panel discussion that engages an international roster of Performance Art Archivists with the question: “How do archives perform?” The question articulates a shared interest between the presenters in exploring how archiving practices must shift when engaging with performance art, and how archiving performance art offers an opportunity to rethink the ‘archive’ more generally. This public dialogue is also an opportunity to look at how archival practices for setting up ‘encounters’ with performance art shift in different contexts internationally.

This public discussion is part of a constellation of talks, performances, and engagements for Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective.

Speaker bios:
Dan Pon (he/him) manages the archive at grunt gallery, an artist-run centre on unceded Coast Salish territory. He is invested in caring for material and non material culture, liberatory community archives, and imaginative models at the intersection of visual art and information science. Dan holds an MLIS from UBC and is also a librarian at Langara College.

Jehan Roberson uses collaboration as an approach within her interdisciplinary art practice. Projects such as ancestral futurities, a psalm for the mismeasured and unfit, and TALIXMXN are all collaborative projects that are co-conceived and produced with artists, choreographers, writers, and family members. She is a magnanimous writer whose work has been published in Public Books, Apogee, VICE, Zora, Women & Performance, and Recess Art, among others. She is currently based in Ithaca, New York, where she is a PhD student in English Language and Literatures at Cornell University.

Lois Keidan is based in London, UK. She was the co-founder and director of the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) from January 1999 to July 2021. Previously she was Director of Live Art at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Performance Art Officer at Arts Council of Great Britain; Performance Co-ordinator for the Midland Group/National review of Live Art, Nottingham; and Performance and Marketing co-ordinator for Theatre Workshop, Edinburgh.

Elaine Lin is Head of Collections at Asia Art Archive. She joined AAA in 2012 and over the years developed and managed numerous archival initiatives in the region. She has also led the collections development of the organisation, and in 2019 established the collection of zines and independent initiatives files in AAA. Lin received training in art history and arts and cultural administration in University College London, School of Oriental and African Studies, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance Studies and Associate Dean, Research in York’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. Her research focuses on site-specific, immersive, and urban intervention performance; performing gender and sexuality; political performance; research-creation; and performance theory. She is author of Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In, and Co-Editor of several books including most recently Performance Studies in Canada (with Marlis Schweitzer). Laura is Principal Investigator for Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices, a SSHRC Partnership Grant that brings together artists, scholars, and activists across Canada, the US, and Latin America to study “hemispheric performance” as a research-creation methodology and tool for social change.