Performing Archives – Process, Trace & Afterlife
Angewandte Performance Lab (APL)
Vienna, 2026
Exhibition & Performative Programme during ANGEWANDTE FESTIVAL 2026
For the Angewandte Festival 2026, the Angewandte Performance Lab (APL) unfolded as a performative archive across four days.
Bringing together traces of artistic production, teaching, documentation and performance, the project explored what remains when artistic processes move on: discarded prototypes, images, audiovisual experiments, technical arrangements, rehearsal residues and material fragments.
Rather than presenting these elements as a completed institutional archive, the exhibition approached them as active materials — traces capable of entering new relations with one another, the architecture and the audience.
The project culminated in the APL Open Stage, shifting the space from an exhibition of performative traces towards a site of live performance, encounter and collective presence.
Angewandte Performance Lab (APL)
Vienna, 2026
Exhibition & Performative Programme during ANGEWANDTE FESTIVAL 2026
For the Angewandte Festival 2026, the Angewandte Performance Lab (APL) unfolded as a performative archive across four days.
Bringing together traces of artistic production, teaching, documentation and performance, the project explored what remains when artistic processes move on: discarded prototypes, images, audiovisual experiments, technical arrangements, rehearsal residues and material fragments.
Rather than presenting these elements as a completed institutional archive, the exhibition approached them as active materials — traces capable of entering new relations with one another, the architecture and the audience.
The project culminated in the APL Open Stage, shifting the space from an exhibition of performative traces towards a site of live performance, encounter and collective presence.
Context: Angewandte Festival 2026
Format: Exhibition, Performance & Living Archive
Location: Angewandte Performance Lab (APL), Georg-Coch-Platz 2, Vienna
Dates: 1–4 July 2026
Curation & Coordination Timothy Nouzak for & with the APL
I. Performing Archives
Exhibition / Spatial Intervention
What remains when a performance, class or artistic process has supposedly ended?
Performing Archives within the APL – Process, Trace & Afterlife transformed the studio into a spatial constellation of materials generated through the ongoing practices of the APL.
Instead of reconstructing a coherent institutional history, the exhibition worked with the partial, unstable and residual qualities of an archive.
Objects, documentation and fragments were reintroduced into the space as materials in their own right — allowing previous processes to enter new relationships and quietly sketch possible afterlives.
II. Traces of Practice
The exhibition brought together different temporalities of the APL: individual artistic positions existed alongside traces of teaching, technical experimentation and previous collective activities.
Among the presented works was Aleksandar Gabrovski's performative installation in murky waters: on the poetics of contamination.
Drawing on memories and recurring childhood nightmares related to the Black Sea and its museum in Varna, the work explores contamination as both material condition and conceptual method.
The exhibition brought together different temporalities of the APL: individual artistic positions existed alongside traces of teaching, technical experimentation and previous collective activities.
Among the presented works was Aleksandar Gabrovski's performative installation in murky waters: on the poetics of contamination.
Drawing on memories and recurring childhood nightmares related to the Black Sea and its museum in Varna, the work explores contamination as both material condition and conceptual method.
Gabrovski's installation brings together domains that conventionally appear separate — matter and decay, personal and collective memory, political and natural environments — while questioning established practices of archiving and aestheticising nature.
The exhibition also incorporated fragments from Stefano D’Alessio's APL course Embodied Media, which investigates audiovisual interaction through bodily movement, voice, cameras and microphones.
By relocating elements from a teaching environment into the exhibition, experiments and unfinished processes became visible as part of the wider ecology of artistic production within the APL.
III. APL Open Stage
Performance / Living Archive
From traces of performance to performance as trace.
On the final afternoon of the festival, the exhibition shifted towards a live-based performance situation.
The APL Open Stage is conceived as an open-ended and self-curated format bringing together performances, encounters and calculated coincidences.
For the festival, it extended directly into the environment created by Performing Archives: process-based student contributions, moving images, sound, film and live situations emerged within a space already populated by installations, objects and archival materials.
The Open Stage was realised in cooperation with the Department of Site-Specific Art.
Performance / Living Archive
From traces of performance to performance as trace.
On the final afternoon of the festival, the exhibition shifted towards a live-based performance situation.
The APL Open Stage is conceived as an open-ended and self-curated format bringing together performances, encounters and calculated coincidences.
For the festival, it extended directly into the environment created by Performing Archives: process-based student contributions, moving images, sound, film and live situations emerged within a space already populated by installations, objects and archival materials.
The Open Stage was realised in cooperation with the Department of Site-Specific Art.
The exhibition became a gathering.
The spatial arrangement largely dissolved the conventional separation between stage and audience.
Visitors sat along and within the performance space, moved between existing installations and continuously renegotiated their relationship to the situations unfolding around them.
The spatial arrangement largely dissolved the conventional separation between stage and audience.
Visitors sat along and within the performance space, moved between existing installations and continuously renegotiated their relationship to the situations unfolding around them.
Bodies, images, sounds and encounters temporarily entered the archive themselves.
In this sense, the Open Stage extended the proposition of the exhibition: an archive not only as something that preserves what has happened, but as something continuously produced through presence, attention and collective encounter.
It’s open. It’s free. It’s yours.
In this sense, the Open Stage extended the proposition of the exhibition: an archive not only as something that preserves what has happened, but as something continuously produced through presence, attention and collective encounter.
It’s open. It’s free. It’s yours.
Performing Archives within the APL – Process, Trace & Afterlife
Students of the Angewandte Performance Laboratory in collaboration with Peter Kozek, Mariella Greil-Möbius and Timothy Nouzak.
APL Open Stage
Students of the APL in collaboration with Peter Kozek, Mariella Greil-Möbius, Krassimira Kruschkova and Timothy Nouzak; in cooperation with the Department of Site-Specific Art.
Students of the Angewandte Performance Laboratory in collaboration with Peter Kozek, Mariella Greil-Möbius and Timothy Nouzak.
APL Open Stage
Students of the APL in collaboration with Peter Kozek, Mariella Greil-Möbius, Krassimira Kruschkova and Timothy Nouzak; in cooperation with the Department of Site-Specific Art.
Curation & Coordination: Timothy Nouzak for & with the APL
Institution: Angewandte Performance Lab, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Festival: Angewandte Festival 2026
More information here:
Performing Archives within the APL – Process, Trace & Afterlife
APL Open Stage
Institution: Angewandte Performance Lab, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Festival: Angewandte Festival 2026
More information here:
Performing Archives within the APL – Process, Trace & Afterlife
APL Open Stage
© Documentation: Angewandte Performance Lab