Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective: Constellating Performance Archives

How archives perform and live performance is archived.

Emerging from the first retrospective exhibition of Canadian performance artist Jess Dobkin, this book reflects on the internationally acclaimed artist’s playful and provocative practice as a performer, curator, and community activist. At the same time, it grapples with a vital question for art and performance studies: How do archives perform?

More than a discrete showing of a single artist’s work, the exhibition, including its new staging in book form, is a large-scale research experiment in performance curation that investigates how art institutions can address the embodied and communal nature of performance art in their practices of archiving and museological display. In Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective, renowned international performance scholars and artists dive into this exploration alongside exhibition curator Emelie Chhangur, performance theorist and dramaturg Laura Levin, and Dobkin herself. These contributions are visually aided by a riot of full-color photographs, providing unparalleled access to Dobkin’s celebrated artistic productions from the last twenty-five years.

Laura Levin is associate professor of theater and performance and director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University in Canada. She is director of the Hemispheric Encounters Network and author of Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In.