Joanna Warsza – författare

During its impressive career over the last decades the term ''performative'' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused.The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and other cultural utterances, but it also emphasises the often dismissed, colloquial notion of the performative as something being ''theatre-like'', believing that those two strands are in fact interdependent and intertwined.Empty Stages, Crowded Flats investigates an array of staged situations, from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums, theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects, and asks how ''theatre-like'' strategies and techniques can in fact enable ''reality making'' situations in art, and how, as a consequence, curating itself becomes staged, dramatised, choreographed, and composed.With contributions by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Knut Ove Arntzen, Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi, Claire Bishop, Beatrice von Bismarck, Rui Catalão, Vanessa Desclaux, Tim Etchells, Galerie, Karin Harrasser, Shannon Jackson, Ana Janevski, Lina Majdalanie, Ewa Majewska, Florian Malzacher, Maayan Sheleff, Gerald Siegmund, Claire Tancons, Kasia Tórz, Rachida Triki, Jelena Vesić, Joanna Warsza, and Catherine Wood.A publication by House on Fire, Live Art Development Agency & Alexander Verlag Berlin. The book series Performing Urgency is supported by the Culture Programme of European Union.

Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary who was appointed commissar of social welfare after the October Revolution and later one of the world’s first woman ambassadors. She fought for abortion rights, secularized marriage, and paid maternity leave—and considered “comradely love” to be a political force. This reader, in which artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai’s legacy in light of current feminist struggles, stems from a research project by CuratorLab at Konstfack and Tensta konsthall that accompanied Dora García’s exhibition “Red Love.” It also features the first English translation of the 1977 biographical play Kollontai by Swedish writer Agneta Pleijel.