A history in acts and gestures: Performance, Central Asia and the Caucasus

The moving, sounding, performing body exists at an intersection with the world, both animating and sensing relations with it. Taking gestures, acts, sounds, and movements across Central Asia and the Caucasus as a starting point, this gathering centres embodied knowledge to ask how the performative both responds to shifting socio-political structures and shapes new forms of being.

What forms of memory, resilience, and knowledge move through the body? What does attending to the body stir in pre-existing historical and art historical narratives? What alternative forms of witnessing and storytelling emerge through performance’s liveness, with its impermanence and immateriality?

Through contributions by artists, academics, curators, and writers in multiple formats, A history in acts and gestures imagines ways toward expanded histories and genealogies of the performative in the region, exploring their capacity to animate how subjectivity, embodiment, and collective existence might be understood or reshaped otherwise.