During its impressive career over the last decades the term 'performative' has been attributed with many parallel meanings in the humanities, philosophy, arts, or economics. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats additionally applies the notion of the performative to the context of curating with the aim to unfold a potential that so far has been mostly unused. The book is following J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and others in their belief in the performative capacity to transform reality with words and other cultural utterances, but it also emphasises the often dismissed, colloquial notion of the performative as something being 'theatre-like', believing that those two strands are in fact interdependent and intertwined. Empty Stages, Crowded Flats investigates an array of staged situations, from choreographed exhibitions, immaterial museums, theatres of negotiation, and discursive marathons, to street carnivals and subversive public-art projects, and asks how 'theatre-like' strategies and techniques can in fact enable 'reality making' situations in art, and how, as a consequence, curating itself becomes staged, dramatised, choreographed, and composed. With contributions by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Knut Ove Arntzen, Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi, Claire Bishop, Beatrice von Bismarck, Rui Catalão, Vanessa Desclaux, Tim Etchells, Galerie, Karin Harrasser, Shannon Jackson, Ana Janevski, Lina Majdalanie, Ewa Majewska, Florian Malzacher, Maayan Sheleff, Gerald Siegmund, Claire Tancons, Kasia Tórz, Rachida Triki, Jelena Vesi, Joanna Warsza, and Catherine Wood. A publication by House on Fire, Live Art Development Agency& Alexander Verlag Berlin. The book series Performing Urgency is supported by the Culture Programme of European Union.

Joanna Warsza ist eine unabhängige Kuratorin, u. a. von Public Art Munich 2018 und Leiterin des CuratorLab an der Stockholmer Kunstakademie Konstfack. Florian Malzacher studierte Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft in Gießen. Er ist Künstlerischer Leiter des Impulse Theater Festivals sowie freier Dramaturg und Autor. Von 2006 bis 2012 war er Leitender Dramaturg des Festivals steirischer herbst in Graz. Er war u.a. (Ko)Kurator der Internationalen Sommerakademie am Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (2002& 2004), der Reihe Performing Lectures in Frankfurt, von Truth is Concrete in Graz (2012) sowie der performativen Konferenz Aneignungen im Ethnologischen Museum Berlin/Humboldt Lab (2015) und von Artist Organisations International am HAU Berlin in 2015. Florian Malzacher ist Herausgeber der englischsprachigen Buchreihe Performing Urgency.