Critical Now - Performance Symposium

The symposium brings together a range of artistic practices and perspectives in order to interrogate how live performance engages with the here and now. What happens in moments when the now exceeds a possible response, the urgency is greater than the means, when words lose meaning and are unable to perform? What is performance transformed to then? 

During this gathering, participating artists and theorists will address current dilemmas through examples of practices and thinking collectively about what can be performed in today's political, social, ecological and ethical breakdown. Exploring the concrete spaces that performance can create as means of survival, mourning, and persistence, this symposium aims to contribute to navigating the present and afterlife of ongoing crises. In a time of fear, violence, and despair what are the possibilities of criticality and live performance? 

When: Thursday 25 September 2025, 9.30 – 18.00
Where: Studio B, Malmö Theatre Academy, Bergsgatan 31A, 21422 Malmö

Studio B is located on the ground floor. Our premises are barrier-free with adapted toilets. The symposium will be in English.

To register:This is a free event, but please register by sending a mail to at stina [dot] engquist [at] thm [dot] lu [dot] se (stina[dot]engquist[at]thm[dot]lu[dot]se) and indicate whether you will attend the whole day or only part of the event

Invited guests

 Ida Bencke, Karmenlara Ely, Eleonora Fabião, Ehsan Fardjadniya, Va-Bene Fiatsi, Ingri Midgard Fiksdal, Laura Harris, Dharmendra Prasad  and Stefanos Levidis

Curated by Gigi Argyropoulou  and Edit Kaldor

This event is supported by Research at Malmö Theatre Academy and by Nordplus.

Biographies 

Ida Bencke, MA, is an independent curator and publisher with the self-organized platform Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, residing on the island of Møn. She is currently co-curating Hosting Lands, a decentralized exhibition process exploring relations between land care, community care and self-organized arts initiatives. Hosting Lands is invested in questions of hacking and redirecting artworld resources towards ecological regeneration, as well as setting up infrastructures for (trans-)local solidarity and community building. She is currently working on a practice-based PhD as part of the research project Oikos - A cultural analysis of care and Crisis in the 21st century at the University of Copenhagen. 

Karmenlara Ely is former Professor / Artistic Director of the BA Acting and MA Performance programs at Østfold University College/Norwegian Theatre Academy. She collaborates internationally on theatre and performance works, where sharing practices across borders is in focus. The work often concerns topics such as archives and spectres, intergenerational relations and the boundaries or limits of performance and ethics in collective processes.  

Eleonora Fabião is a performance artist and theorist. She has been performing, participating in exhibitions, lecturing, teaching, and publishing internationally. Things That Must Be Done (Performa Biennial, New York 2015) is the title of a work and, also, a way of referring to her artistic practice. Fabião’s performances have been enacted in several contexts – festivals, exhibitions, biennials, sociocultural projects – and, mainly, in the streets. Full Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and Researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development in Brazil (CNPq), Fabião is Doctor Honoris Causa at the University of Gothenburg.

Ehsan Fardjadniya is a visual and performance artist living in exile. With a background in fine arts and a strong focus on storytelling through hybrid and documentary performance forms, his work explores themes of displacement, memory, and the porous boundary between dreams and reality. He has presented his films, performances, and installations internationally, and continues to experiment with animation, co-creative methods, and narrative structures that invite non-actors and audiences to engage as active participants.

 Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [ aka crazinisT artisT]  (1981) lives in Kumasi, Ghana and is the founder and artistic director of crazinisT artisT studiO (TTO), Our Railway Cinema Gallery (ORCG) and perfocraZe International Artists Residency (pIAR) which aimed at radicalising the arts and promoting exchange between international and local artists, activists, researchers, curators, and critical thinkers. As a performer and installation artist, crazinisT investigates gender stereotypes, prejudices, queerness, identity politics and conflicts, sexual stigma and their consequences for marginalised groups or individuals.  crazinisT has performed and exhibited across the globe

Ingri Fiksdal works as a choreographer based in Oslo, Norway. She holds a PhD in artistic research (2019) from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and was an affiliated researcher with CoFutures at the University of Oslo (2020-24). Ingri works with choreography as a format of speculative fiction that can propose complex and manyfold understandings of body, gender, species, knowledge and history. Ingri is concerned with how practice and theory are entangled in her work in a way where neither is perceived as anterior to the other. Ingri’s work has in recent years been performed at The Bentway in Toronto, Obscene Festival in Seoul, Homo Novus in Riga, Kunstenfestival in Brussels, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Santarcangelo festival, Beijing Contemporary Dance Festival, Sommerszene in Salzburg, Reykjavík Art Museum, brut-Wien, Teatro di Roma, Harbourfront Centre Toronto, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, BUDA Kortrijk, Tanzhaus NRW in Dusseldorf and Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, alongside extensive touring in Norway. She is currently working towards an exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo with Helle Siljeholm, which will open in November 2025.

Laura Harris is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Art & Public Policy at New York University. She is the author of Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (2019). She has also published in Social Text, sx salon, Women & Performance, Criticism, The South Atlantic Quarterly, and other journals. 

Dharmendra Prasad is an artist and a community organizer. He is stuck between ecological and industrial time practices. Born-in-between stories, discrimination, hierarchies, chaos and silence, winds and dusts and without any address, Dharmendra practices between fields of Gangatic plains to the villages, water bodies and rainforests of northeast India. In addition he has co-founded the Guwahati based Anga Art Collective, Library of Illiterates and Harvest School. Harvest School is a self-organized art-pedagogical infrastructure in Buxar, India. The initiative centers epistemic justice by implementing slowness and agrarian imaginaries as tools to counter violent pedagogies, and the erasure of landscapes, collectivity and ancestral memory.

Stefanos Levidis is a spatial and visual researcher, and is the co-founder and co-director of Forensic Architecture Initiative Athens (FAIA). Stefanos has been working with Forensic Architecture and Forensis since 2016, overseeing the agencies’ work on borders and migration and holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, titled ‘Border Natures: The Environment as Weapon at the Edges of Greece’. He is an Associate Professor at the Athens School of Fine Arts and a postdoctoral fellow at the National Hellenic Research Foundation under the project ‘MUTE: Soundscapes of Trauma’.

Edit Kaldor (H/NL/S) is a theatre maker, writer, and researcher. Her performances, which stretch considerably the boundaries of theatrical conventions, have toured extensively throughout Europe, in the Americas, Asia and North Africa. In 2023 she completed her doctoral project The Many and the Form on contemporary dramaturgies of co-creation and intersubjectivity as a research fellow at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. The book A Theatre of Powerlessness – Acts of Knowledge and the Performance of the Many that she co-edited with Joe Kelleher was published in May 2025 by Bloomsbury publishers in the Thinking through Theatre series. Since 2023 she is associate professor and program director of the new MA Performing Arts as Critical Practice  programme at the Malmö Theatre Academy at Lund University in Sweden. 

Gigi Argyropoulou (PhD, MA) is a theorist, curator, performance maker and practitioner working in the fields of performance and cultural practice. Gigi co-initiated, curated and organised public programmes, interventions, performances, festivals, conferences, actions, occupations and exhibitions both inside and outside institutions. She is  co-editor of Performance Research issues on Institutions(2015) and Land/scapes (2025) and publishes regularly in journals, books and magazines. Gigi is co-founder of EIGHT Cultural Institute for arts and politics in Athens and was a member of the curatorial and editorial board of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)'s New Alphabet School (2019–2022). She is editor of Instituting: Space-making, Refusal and Organising in Arts and Beyond (Archive books, 2024) and completed her post-doc at Lund University. Currently, teaches at the MA performing arts as critical practice. 
 

Schedule

9.00  Arrivals/Coffee 

9.30 - 10.00 Welcome note by Gigi Argyropoulou and Edit Kaldor 

10.00- 10.50 Lecture: Eleonora FabiãoTHINGS THAT MUST BE DONE: artistic experimentation and political imagination

11.00 -12.30 Practice sharing and conversation: Other Publics: Vulnerability and Public Space- VaBene Fiatsi, Eleonora Fabiao, Karmenlara Ely

12.30-13.30 Lunch 

13.30-14.50  Practice sharing and dialogue Borders, Forensics and Legislation - Ehsan Fardjadniya and Stefanos Levidis 

15.00-15.45 Lecture: Laura Harris Negotiating the scene(s): Performing in the General Vicinity of a Camera in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s

16.00 - 17.30 Practice sharing and conversation: Speculative Ecologies and Performance Futures - Ingri Fiksdal, Ida Bencke, Dharmendra Prasad

17.30-18.00 Closing reflections