At the invitation of mumok, the ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival opens up its cabinets, drawers and treasure chests for the first time, presenting posters, programme books and booklets as well as – starting with b/w photographs – pictures through changing ages. A “pop-up” archive, a wild and precise mixture perfectly capturing the spirit of the festival. Always with its finger on the “pulse” of current affairs – both close to the artists and to societal developments –, a history of the festival is also a history of dance and choreography since the emergence of what, in the 1980s, differentiated itself as “contemporary dance” from modernism and postmodernism in the West.

The exhibition Never Final! The Evolving Museum serves as a conceptual resonance chamber: contemporary dance, like the museum, is a space of permanent transition. ImPulsTanz had its part in this evolution – through its founders Karl Regensburger and Ismael Ivo, through numerous collaborators, employees and international artists as well as through the audience, which helped shape and carry this development.

Founded 1984 as Internationale Tanzwochen Wien (“International Dance Weeks Vienna”) and as a workshop festival, ImPulsTanz has grown over the decades into Europe’s biggest festival for contemporary dance and performance, drawing around 150.000 yearly visitors with its unique mixture of guest performances and world premieres by the most renowned choreographers, the Young Choreographers’ Series (established in 2001), the vivid bustle of the workshop and research department, the parties as well as Public Moves, its free dance classes in public space.

From the very start, the audience served as a driving force, its ever-growing encouragement leading to the “never final” form of this (not at all “planned”) structure and its history in the first place.

The project space gathers memories by festival companions – artists, journalists as well as audience members – through contemporary dialogue in “dance talks”. They speak of movements that reach well beyond dance and follow not only questions of their own history or dance history, but all the different (international) contexts that have influenced their art, their work and their life – which are always stories of motion as wellNostalgia is deliberately not excluded – everything changes, that much we know. But also, in the words of Rio Reiser: Es kann nicht gelingen, solange wir allein sind (“It cannot work out, as long as we’re alone”).

Collection: ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival
Concept: Chris Standfest
Project Space by Edgar Aichinger, Lara Hackländer, David Hampel, Anna Kudla, Sean Pfeiffer, Felix Reutzel, Marie-Christine Rissinger, Chris Standfest
Thanks to Karl Regensburger