"Moments. A History of Performance in 10 Acts" is an international live exhibition on the history of art performance in dance and fine art. As an exhibition 'in progress', the project shows and develops new formats of museal presentation of live acts. The exhibition begins in an empty exhibition space. During the eight week duration of the exhibition project a scenic act of around ten central stages of dance and performance history unfolded − as witnessed by a group of students invited to accompany and observe for the entire period − before a public. One of the key focal points is the performances and works by women who have consciously been thematizing, transgressing and critiquing the genre boundaries between dance, performance, and visual media since the 1960s. Here, they likewise reflect on the implicit male constructions of the gaze and the gestural logic of their colleagues.

Among others, the artists represented in the exhibition will be Marina Abramović, Graciela Carnevale, Simone Forti, Anna Halprin, Reinhild Hoffmann, Channa Horwitz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sanja Iveković, Adrian Piper and Yvonne Rainer. The artists themselves partly document their historical performances in exhibition spaces. Boris Charmatz, in collaboration with colleagues from art and theory, approaches the documented works scenically and develops on-site a live act in a laboratory situation around this central moment of performance history. The artists Ruti Sela will be documenting this artistic approach to the work of their predecessors by way of film documentaries and will produce a film in the actual exhibition context itself. Furthermore new performative methods and actions of art education regarding historical performances will be developed.

The starting point is the interest in the processes of coming to terms with history in so-called enactments of historic performances, but which also comes to expression in the recently erupted controversy surrounding the museal presentability of performances by Joseph Beuys in photographic documentation. This is also reflected in the practice of a younger generation of performers and choreographs, such as in numerous historical appropriations and re-enactments. At the center of this is the "heroic" period of the 1960s to the 1980s in which a radical (new) definition of the genres took place in the more intimate dialog between performance movements of fine art and dance.