Panel talk: The Lives & Afterlives of Performance

In Relation is an exhibition about the live performances of Peter Roche & Linda Buis undertaken between 1979 and 1985. Given these were unrepeatable actions with only a handful of people in attendance, their reconstruction draws exclusively on the surviving archive of photographs, film and video footage, drawings, texts, artist-publications, and published and unpublished commentary. This raises many questions about what now constitutes the work, especially as we realise that Roche & Buis used the camera as a structuring element in the execution of their work and as a key vehicle for the production of its afterlife.

Christina Barton will be joined by four invested experts: contemporary art curator Natasha Conland; writer and curator Wystan Curnow; writer and curator specialising in Moana art, Ioana Gordon-Smith, and artist and educator Shannon Te Ao in a conversation addressing the issues raised by performance art, including how the site of meaning shifts between live action and the camera, the archive and the exhibition, and the differences between performance in the 1980s and now.