Thursday, May 29, 2025 | In-Person 7:00PM | RSVP
Location: Penumbra Highlight Studios

A Lecture in Two Acts:

On performing with archival documents and remapping history through a politics of montage

A Lecture in Two Acts brings together Ruth Estévez and Sandra Erbacher in a live lecture performance that explores how archives can be reactivated through embodied research and the critical use of montage. Moving between historical fragments and performative gestures, the artists examine how documents speak—not only as singular records of the past but as unstable, layered sites of meaning, shaped by context, interpretation, and the material conditions of their reappearance. Through a choreography of images, texts, and ruptured timelines, Estévez and Erbacher reveal distinct yet overlapping methodologies that disturb linear historiography and make room for embodied memories, affective resonances, and speculative remappings of the past.

About the Artists

Sandra Erbacher is a German interdisciplinary artist living and working in Providence, RI. Her collages, photographs, installations and artist books critically engage with the archive as an active site of the ongoing production and negotiation of history. She has earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014) and her BFA from Camberwell College of Art, London (2009). She also holds a BA and MA in Sociology from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Erbacher has exhibited nationally and internationally, at Penumbra Foundation, Rueff Gallery, Purdue University, Cuchifritos, mh PROJECT, The International Studio and Curatorial Program, Stellar Projects, Spring/ Break, Grin Providence, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI, Parisian Laundry, Montreal, and Space, Portland. Most recently, Erbacher has participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency (2024). In previous years, she won a Center for Book Arts Residency, and a Manhattan Graphics Center Scholarship (2023), and participated in the 2019 Artist Alliance Lower East Side Studio Program, the 2017-18 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency, and the 2015 NARS Foundation Residency. She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the 2014 Chazen Prize to an Outstanding MFA Student and the Blink Grant for Public Art 2013.
sandraerbacher.com

Ruth Estévez is a researcher, performer and curator focusing on the development of new artistic fields of knowledge through research and interdisciplinary initiatives. She is actually the co-Director of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has served as Artistic Director at Amant in Brooklyn (2020-2023), Senior Curator-at-large at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham (2018-2020), and Director and Curator of the Gallery at REDCAT (2012-2018). Ruth has independently organized exhibitions, public programs, and symposiums, including the 34th Sao Paolo Biennial (2021), Current: LA Water (2016), and "Idiorrithmics" (2018-2021), the annual performance program at MACBA in Barcelona. Before moving to the US, she served as the Chief Curator at the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City (2006-2012), where she also founded LIGA, Space for Architecture (2011-), a non-profit platform that encourages experimentation in architecture and spatial art from Latin America. 

As a researcher and performer she has explored new formats and methodologies of production and presentation, organizing works in the form of conferences, events, writing, editing, and workshops. She has collaborated with artists such as Gala Porras-Kim, Sung Tieu, Manthia Diawara, Javier Téllez, Allora & Calzadilla, and Hector Zamora, and presented group exhibitions as Hotel Theory (2015),  focusing on the performance of theory in contemporary art; Chalk Circles (2017), analyzing acting methodologies in the 20th century based on mixed traditions of movement and gesture, as well as pedagogic models. As part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative she organized the research project The Words of Others, that explored how collective memory is rehearsed and performed. The performance piece traveled to PAMM in Miami, MNCARS in Madrid and Jumex Museum (2018). 

Currently she is preparing a theatre piece for Macba in Barcelona, exploring the idea of collectiviness in the process of theater making. 

She has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs and art publications and she has taught at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, and Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. Estévez holds  BFA from the University of the Basque Country and a master's degree in Art History from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM, and she is currently completing a PhD in Art, Education, and Research at UCLM, Cuenca, focusing on the aesthetic, social, and political shifts of collective creation in performance. 

Any changes to the program will be announced online. All lectures and other events are held at Penumbra Foundation at 7pm. This event is Free to the public.

36 E. 30th St. New York, NY, 10016 (between Madison Ave. & Park Ave. South
(917) 288-0343 | info@penumbrafoundation.org | penumbrafoundation.org