When conserving media art and presenting it in museums, curators and restorers now often have to weigh historical materiality versus the artist’s intention for the work. Restores face the challenge of preserving the original material substance of spacious art installations that are often site-specific and were created in complex contexts with various media.

When such works of art are transferred to new exhibition contexts, questions arise, especially with regard to their spatial structure. Curators develop new approaches to the contemporary presentation of performative and event-based works that as a rule can be experienced through documentation in videos and photographs and surviving written materials and rudiments. Preserving and making visible technology-based forms of art depends on how up-to-date their storage media and data formats are and how they have been affected by accelerated technological development. The goal pursued in that process is to define and preserve the authenticity of the work, which can exist in different manifestations or presentations

The conference being announced will present several examples of cases and then discuss associated concepts such as reconstruction, reproduction, and remake as well as today’s exhibition and conversation practices based on them, especially in the fields of ephemeral art. What paths doe museums and exhibition venues take to show performative and sound-and moving-image-based works? Has categorizing into original and copy become obsolete today? To what extent can an interpretation be oriented around the history of a work’s exhibition and what are the limits? Can the performative or even conceptual character of works be so distinct that new presentations represent distinctive yet authentic solutions?