11. März 2026, 17.00 Uhr Kunstuni Linz, Hauptplatz 8, 4020 Linz (Lecture Hall F - H8.05.03)
Co-organised and hosted by Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald
Held at the Kunstuniversität Linz (University of Arts Linz) during the summer term 2026 and co-hosted by the OLFAC team, this lecture series brings together artists, scholars and curators to explore the senses as dynamic sites of practice and inquiry.
The series approaches the senses as a stage and performance as a method of sensing. It begins from the premise that both senses and performance are not fixed domains, but active, porous and contested fields of practice. Drawing on the 2007 publication of the same name by Sally Banes and André Lepecki, The Senses in Performance reactualizes their investigation into the “critical thresholds where the corporeal meets the social, the somatic meets the historical, the cultural meets the biological, and imagination meets the flesh.“
The senses are inherently political. They organise what can be felt, seen, and known. Performance, in turn, offers a laboratory for their (re-)arrangement. From a decidedly multi- and intersensory perspective, we ask how cultural and artistic performances address the sensorium. How do the senses collaborate, compete, or fail one another?
And which hierarchies – e.g., between seeing and smelling, rationality and intuition, body and mind – do we still enact, often implicitly, when we perceive, create, or study? On a weekly basis, artists, scholars and curators discuss how to think and act through sensory methods: to approach vision, sound, touch, smell, or proprioception not as neutral channels of experience but as historically and culturally shaped knowledge regimes. Across disciplines, we ask how sensory hierarchies can be worked with, and how biases – of gender, ability, race, or technology – might be engaged productively, as material for critical invention.
The lecture series is open to the public – everyone is most welcome to attend. The introduction session is held in English, lectures are held both in English and German.
All sessions take place on Wednesdays, 5:00–6:30 pm CET
place:
University of Arts Linz
Hauptplatz 8
4020 Linz
Lecture Hall F (H80503)
Dates:
11. März 2026
Introduction by OLFAC – Silke Felber, Freda Fiala and Julia Ostwald
25. März 2026
320 GB im Rucksack – der physische Aspekt digitaler Kunst über Gletscher
Tina Frank (Visual Communication, University of Arts Linz) &
Alexis Dworsky (Media Design, University of Arts Linz)
15. April 2026
Dis_sensual – A crip choreographer’s re-distribution of the sensible
Michael Turinsky (Artist, Vienna)
22. April 2026
Performing Snakes in Modernity and Today
Nicole Haitzinger (Dance Studies, University of Salzburg) &
Christina Gillinger (Tanzquartier Vienna TQW)
29. April 2026
Lingering with Bass (2024, Steve McQueen)
Ulrike Hanstein (VALIE EXPORT Center, University of Arts Linz)
6. Mai 2026
Sinn für Unlösbares
bankleer – Karin Kasböck & Christoph Maria Leitner
13. Mai 2026
Mimi o Sumasu – the Very Act of Listening
Mia Yoshida (Artistic Research and Head of the Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts Vienna)
20. Mai 2026
Tasting skin. On chilis and chills
Karin Harrasser (Cultural Studies, University of Arts Linz and Director of
ifk – International Research Center for Cultural Studies)
27. Mai 2026
Olfactory Violence and the Freedom to Speak: Stink Bombs in Interwar Europe
William Tullett (Early Modern History, University of York)
3. Juni 2026
Sensing the Atmospheres of Painters’ Studios in Nineteenth-Century France
Erika Wicky (Olfactions, Université Grenoble Alpes)
10. Juni 2026
Hee-Hawing Democracy: Somatic Articulations Beyond the Logos - Inhalt folgt
Bettina Wuttig (University of Marburg)
17. Juni 2026
Greetings from the Swamp
Maria Nalbantova (Artist, Sofia)
24. Juni 2026
A loving ear – toward a poetic ecology of feeling
Brandon LaBelle (Independent Researcher, Berlin)
A live stream will be available. The link will be shared with registered participants.
If you would like to attend online, please register via: office.olfac@kunstuni-linz.at