Encounters, Exchanges, and Ruptures: An Exhibition Catalog of Global Artists

Abstract

Global Groove: Art, Dance, Performance & Protest is the title of both an exhibition that took place at the Museum Folkwang in 2021, and its catalog, which includes fourteen essays that examine a century of interdisciplinary exchange among dance, performance, and the visual arts. The catalog vividly chronicles expansive encounters between Europe, Asia, and North America, and its images take center stage. Through lush layouts and gorgeous photos of striking artworks, this wide book gives these images space to breathe, with singular works occupying multiple pages. This design vivifies the artists’ projects, and speaks to one of the most valuable contributions of this book: its inquiries into the role of documentation in histories of dance and performance. A closing essay by Walter Moser considers questions of documentation through archival records of Japanese post-World War II dance and performance groups, such as the Hi Red Center collaboration with Tokuji Murai, and Butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata with Eikoh Hosoe. Moser examines a well-known photo book collaboration between Hijikata and Hosoe called Kamaitachi, and the images that helped create a mythology around Hijikata and cement his legacy. In both form and content, the catalog provokes important questions about how performances are documented, and for whom these images are created. The exhibition, which took place in Germany, and the catalog, which is printed in German and English, includes very few Asian, Eurasian, or Asian American writers. Perhaps including more of those voices could have strengthened the analysis of “exchange” between “East” and “West,” which seems to be a throughline of the publication. I use quotes around these terms because they imply a particular dichotomy, homogenization, and static center. The essays primarily present an encyclopedic archive of varying art and performance movements between Asia, Europe, and North America, as well as notable meetings and collaborations among artists. What seems to