Lecture Series – The Senses in Performance

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
Lecture Hall F (H80503)
Hauptplatz 8, 4020 Linz

A live stream will be available.

The link will be shared with registered participants. Ich you would like to attend online,
please register via: : office.olfac@kunstuni-linz.at.