LISA MORAVEC
Art historian/
performance studies scholar
--occasional critic, editor, curator--and body practitioner
specialised in the intersections of the performing and visual arts
Curating Performance, Art, Discourse, Academic Conferences
Workshop Series, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Tanzquartier Wien, 20.4.2026–2.6.2026
"Bodily Intelligence: Decentralising the Performance of ‘Intelligence’"
A 4-part transdisciplinary workshop series exploring connections between body and mind in creative and critical practices.
Organised by Lisa Moravec (FWF project The Performance of Critique, Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Summer Semester 2026) in collaboration with Tanzquartier Wien.
In performance practice, diverse kinds of bodily intelligence and subjectivity are explored, reimagined, and transformed. This transdisciplinary four-part workshop series brings together embodied practice with critical writing to investigate how bodily experience shapes theoretical reflection. Rather than doing theory through the appropriation of established concepts, the repetition of inherited movement forms, or critique based on hegemonic values that underpin the marginalization of underrepresented social groups, the workshops invite participants to engage with individually and collectively shaped conscious and unconscious processes. Through this exploration, we consider how bodies shape their minds, and how minds, in turn, shape bodies. While techno-capitalist narratives increasingly speculate about artificial intelligence becoming fully conscious, the series recenters the aesthetics of embodied knowledge to envision how we want to live with other living beings and AI systems, and how these relations could facilitate the conditions for a more democratic and socially inclusive future.
1) Nonconforming Criticisms: Practices, Strategies, Poetic
Dr. Diana Damian Martin, Royal School of Drama and Speech, University of London, 20-21 April 2026
In this two-part workshop, we explore criticism as a practice with entanglements between art, theory, politics, and performance. We focus on forms and approaches to criticism and criticality that are less legible or visible in established contexts. We turn to the borderlands and look to the gaps, peripheries, and experiments where criticism emerges as a practice, set of methods, and political commitment. How might criticality offer ways to attend to current moments, and what relations do we want to foster in these borderlands? This workshop welcomes those (artists, theorists, researchers, arts workers, etc.) who are interested in a collaborative and experimental approach to criticism.
A Lunchtime Conversation on Non-conforming Criticism
In this dialogue between Diana and Lisa, Diana will discuss non-conforming criticisms, tending to many experiments and practices of thinking at the borderlands of performance that dispute, defy and resist the category of criticism itself. What might abolitionist thought teach us about the role of hope, joy, and imagination in critical engagements? Where is performance in criticism? How might we orient ourselves more radically in relation to critical practice?
2) Improvisation for Contacters
Jurij Konjar (Slovenian dancer), 8-10 June 2026
We get lost in the dance, and we like it. Getting lost can be a break from planning, controlling, wanting. It can be a break from the responsibility of being oneself. So we stop planning ahead and become available. Available for what though? Someone or something is sensing and responding there, where I become an available observer. It’s not exactly me, and yet I'm also not excluded.
What are those processes, observed in action? How can I, while also being the medium, still notice them from a(nother) perspective? Once I do notice them, can I perhaps redirect them? Sustain them? Take them as far as they will go? By naming them in a verbal exchange, how can I share them with my partners? How can this dialogue remain ‘a proposition in form of a question, to be answered daily’, which lies at the root of the original proposition of Contact Improvisation?
3) Technologies of Abstract Experience
Prof. Adam Nocek and Prof. Stacey Moran, Arizona State University, 27 May 2026
This workshop explores how technologies of abstraction function across myriad domains of contemporary experience and practice. Rather than treating abstraction only as reductive logic associated with technoscientific modernity, this session asks how the technicites of abstraction also play a foundational role in the production of lived and embodied experience—in other words, experience is already abstract. Drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks (process philosophy, STS, feminist epistemologies of science) and contemporary practices (design, performance, media arts, and computing), the session invites participants to experiment with various possibilities for thinking-feeling the necessity of abstraction. In doing so, we consider why it may be incumbent upon us to ensure that experience is more, rather than less, abstract.
4) Soma poetic strategies (a voice-dance-writing workshop thinking with the edges of listening)
Veza Fernandez, 2 June 2026
In this workshop Veza Fernandez shares a series of invisible instruments or tools that grow from the body to connect with the limits of what we can almost not hear nor understand. These instruments are conduits, membranes, streams, resonant chambers, which are activated by feeling them grow from different bones and organs from within and between our bodies. These instruments manifest through imagining them while being embodied. They are used to reach far out towards the smoothest, the quietest, the farthest sounds as well as estimations of what those could be. Dance, poem, and song become here an ever-morphing body that mediates between becoming instrument, reaching towards so far unnoticed sonic information and prompt us to imagine how the instrument could actually be played.
In a time where attention is fractured, when technologies stretch and compress perception, producing the illusion of total access while thinning the depth of encounter, these embodied instruments act otherwise. They do not accelerate connection; instead, they complicate it. They insist on opacity, on intermittence. They cultivate an echoethics, a practice of relating through resonance rather than capturing, through attunement rather than extraction. An ethics that acknowledges distance, distortion, and delay. It listens not for clarity alone, but for texture, for interference, for the ways bodies register what cannot be fully shared.
Understanding that we can dance, write, sing, and become in order to listen and to think about listening and its poetics while practicing listening. Not to master the instrument, but to let the instrument undo the certainty of the listener.
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International Conference Organisation
FWF Project The Performance of Critique
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 18-19 March 2026.
'Performance and Contemporary Art History: Mapping a Critical Subject, Medium, and Method in a Transdisciplinary Field'
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 4-5 November 2026
organised with Ass. Prof. Dr. Lisa Beißwanger (University of Koblenz)
'Artists' Archives and Estates', Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 5 October 2024
Curated and Organised together with the Österreichisches Forum für Vor- & Nachlässe bildender Kunst & Curated by
This year, Vienna’s annual gallery festival, Curated By, is accompanied for the first time by a symposium, focused on artists’ archives and estates. It provides a public forum to investigate the relationship between art objects, cultural institutions (galleries, museums), art historians and universities. It builds on Noit Banai’s notion of “untold narratives” and delves into questions such as: What should artists consider when they archive their work today in the digital age? How and why do certain artistic bodies of work [do not] become significant to cultural institutions, such as galleries and museums? And what surplus value does a critical and selective practice of analysing and historicising contemporary art add to art objects and collections? The panels and the concluding roundtable discussion of the symposium address established practices of institutionalising and historicising contemporary art to envision more symbiotic collaborations across the actors of the art world. The day will focus on the following issues: the practicalities of archiving; the politics of historicising and collecting; and the maintenance, circulation, and exhibition of artists’ pre-estates.
'Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy: Dissident Practices'
Technical University Vienna (Visual Cultures)/Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien
co-organised with Carmen Lael Hines, with international artistic and academic contributions, 4 December 2023.
‘Love Spells: Rituals for Another World’
Co-organised with Lilly Markaki, online, Royal Holloway, 28-30 May 2020.
https://lovespellsrhul.wixsite.com/2020/symposium-programme
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ART CURATION
Guest Curator, Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Begin Suddenly In Splendor. Rose English: Performance, Presence, Spectacle,
5 July 2024 - 4 May 2025 (curated with Marijana Schneider)
The Museum der Moderne Salzburg is presenting the first comprehensive exhibition in the German-speaking world of works by the British artist Rose English. Born in 1950 in Hereford, English developed her unique working methods in the UK in the midst of the conceptual art, dance and feminist scenes of the 1970s. Today, she is one of the most influential performance artists. Her extraordinary, interdisciplinary oeuvre combines elements of theater, circus, variety and opera in order to explore themes of gender politics, the identity of the performer and the metaphysics of presence—the very nature of being a performer.
This exhibition will use multimedia installations to provide an insight into English’s unique method. Her early involvement with ballet and dressage, whose common roots lie in European Baroque, led to English developing her famous feminist dance performance Quadrille (1975) and her performance with a horse My Mathematics (1992). Three of her major stage performances will be shown in public for the first-ever time in the form of a new site-specific installation.
A specially commissioned performance program will accompany this exhibition, with performances by younger international artists whose work is related to English’s artistic practice.
A publication at DISTANZ in German and English versions will accompany the exhibition.
4-Part Performance Programme
Museum der Moderne Salzburg, July 2024 - Nov 2024, curated with Marijana Schneider.
--- Esben Weile Kjaer, COLLIDER! (I want to believe the second act), 27.7.
https://www.museumdermoderne.at/en/events/detail/i-want-to-believe-the-second-act-collider/
--- Nina Beier/Bob Kil, Boyfriend, 15.8.
https://www.museumdermoderne.at/en/events/detail/boyfriend/
--- Raphaela Vogel mit Juliane Liebert und Daniel Roth, 'Where is the f*ing anchor of Charon?', 10. 10.
https://www.museumdermoderne.at/en/events/detail/performance-where-is-the-fing-anchor-of-charon/
--- Philipp Gehmacher, 'The Things of the World (For Rose)', 7.11.
https://www.museumdermoderne.at/en/events/detail/the-things-of-the-world-for-rose/
(co-curated with Marijana Schneider, Museum der Moderne Salzburg)
Gallery Exhibition
"A Tale of Two Cities", photographic work by Wolfgang Lehrner and Giovanna Silva, Galerie Zeller van Almsick, part of Photo Wien, Vienna, 31 May - 8 July 2023
-- https://www.fotowien.at/en/ausstellung/a-tale-of-two-cities-foto-wien-2023/
-- Text: Jonny Niesche, Seeing Colours, available here
Museum - Film Screening
'(Art)Activism in the 21st-Century', event, Belvedere21, Blickle Kino, Vienna, 12 November 2022.
Screening Programm: Gerald Nestler, Countering Capitulation (2014); Forensic Architecture, Model Zoo (2020); Vladan Joler, New Extractivism (2021)
The event was framed with a panel discussion between Nestler, Joler, and myself.
https://www.belvedere.at/event/kunst-aktivismus-im-21-jahrhundert
Dramaturgical Input
Theory and outside eye, March 2022-December 2022
Georg Blaschke’s dance piece ‘Extinct Choreographies’, Vienna, Seestadt.
Artistic Support
Sophia Süßmilch, solo exhibition SANATORUM SÜßMILCH, Landesgalerie Linz, 2023.
https://www.ooekultur.at/exhibition-detail/sophia-s%c3%bcssmilch
Curating Discourse
Curated by (Vienna's International Gallery Festival), autumn 2024
Focus: Artists’ Archives and Estates
The program of this year Curated By is also dedicated to the topic of artists’ archives and estates. Two new formats will take place as part of the festival’s Fokustage. https://curatedby.at/focus
---EXPERT TALK SERIES (hybrid podcast format)
As part of the festival’s discursive format, the curators of the gallery exhibitions will be in dialogue with art historians. These conversations will focus on the challenges of art historical evaluation and practices of making visible the archives and estates of the presented artists. Artistic strategies of (self-)archiving will also be discussed, as well as the role that art critics, galleries, and museums play in these processes. These conversations will take place live in the galleries.
Available as podcasts on our Website, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/2hvCaDtPnHxKxlhkeM0aLk?si=xd5x0MQTSOeshkWVndt2ww
‘Dance & Performance: Histories of Feminist Practices’
With artists and academics, London Senate House, co-organised with Josephine Leask, keynote by Dr. Sarah Gorman (invited speaker), 17 June 2022.
‘On Criticism’
Royal Holloway, University of London/Central School of Drama and Speech
Co-organised with Clio Unger and Josephine Leask
keynote speakers Prof. Dr. Sabeth Buchmann and Dr. Duška Radosavljevic, 23 November 2018.
- - Talks
‘Glitch, Glitschen, Glissade’
talk by Christina Jauernik in dialogue with Lisa Moravec,
part of university-wide event series 'Everywhere it is Machines', Royal Holloway, 27 May 2021.
- - Participatory Workshops
‘Art as political praxis’
Workshop, part of the Joseph Beuys exhibition at Belvedere 21, Vienna, 4 May 2021.
‘Balancing Arts and the Everyday’
Organised a workshop run by Prof. Dr. Alexandra Kolb, funded by the University of London Fund, Royal Holloway, 21 May 2021.
‘Writing about dance’
Tanzquartier, Vienna 25 June 2018, https://tqw.at/tqw-doc-2/
Live Performances
with Club Fortuna
--- New Balance, Schauspielhaus Wien, part of Sägezahn-Festival, 14 April 2023, Vienna.
--- opening performance, Kunsthaus Graz, 25 May 2023.
Live dance performance, ‘Rehearsing: Moving Together/Apart'
With Dr. Sarah Blissett & Philip Leitner, 8 December 2019, as part of Philosophy Unbound, Studio Thor, Brussels.
https://philosophyunbound.tumblr.com/post/189352653427/philosophy-unbound-25-program
Reading of my poems
No Bounds Radio, London, 2020.
--- ‘Witches’
--- ‘Prometheus’