ABOUT

Gertrude Stein wrote, "A sentence means that there is a future." (Replace sentence with the performance.) Henry James delighted in "the visitable past." Alfred North Whitehead spoke of occasions of experience, "the really real things which compose the evolving universe." We want to speak about how our performances operate as intergenerational transmission. Our current ten artist collaborative team spans a 60-year age range. Does time mean the same thing to all of them? What pedagogies of past and future intertwine our collective thinking? What does it mean to endure? What will happen to our Tweets after we die?"

In conjunction with the French Institute Alliance Française's Crossing the Line festival, and in collaboration with Columbia University School of the Arts as part of Curating the Ephemeral, MoMA's Department of Media and Performance Art hosted three talks for Afterlives: The Persistence of Performance. Convened by Adrian Heathfield and André Lepecki, Afterlives addressed the ways in which so-called ephemeral art persists over time.