Performa is a non-profit arts organization well-known for the Performa Biennial, a festival of performance art that happens every two year in various venues and institutions in New York City. [1] Performa was founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg. Since 2005, Performa curators have included Charles Aubin, Defne Ayas, Tairone Bastien, Mark Beasley, Adrienne Edwards, Laura McLean-Ferris, Kathy Noble, Job Piston, and Lana Wilson. The organization commissions new works and tours performances premiered at the biennial. It also manages the work of choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer.
In 2005, Performa hosted the first Performa Biennial, a series of performance events at venues and institutions across New York City. Founding curator and director, RoseLee Goldberg is quoted as saying her objective in creating the festival was "to produce new work that I'd never seen before and have the miracle of working with artists who would make things of wonder. The second was to deal with this history." [2] Performa 05 presented new works by artists working in performance as well as first performance works by artists working in other mediums. The biennial also re-staged seminal performance works from history. [3]
Artists Jesper Just and Francis Alÿs presented new live performances specifically commissioned for Performa 05 and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presented Marina Abramović's Seven Easy Pieces , in which Abramović re-performed several works from the canon of early performance works, including two of her own. Performances included works by Gina Pane, Vito Acconci, Valie Export, Bruce Nauman, and Joseph Beuys. [4] Other featured artists in Performa 05 included Shirin Neshat, Clifford Owens, Tamy Ben-Tor, Laurie Simmons, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Coco Fusco, and Christian Marclay. [5]
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.
Scott Benzel is an American visual artist, musician, performance artist, and composer. Benzel is a member of the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.
RoseLee Goldberg is an American-based art historian, author, critic and curator of performance art. She is most well known as being the founder and director of Performa, a performance art organisation. She is also currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Arts Administration at New York University.
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is a collecting museum located in North Miami, Florida. The 23,000-square-foot (2,100 m2) building was designed by the architecture firm Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects, New York City.
My Barbarian is a Los Angeles based collaborative theatrical group consisting of Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The trio makes site-responsive performances and video installations that use theatrical play to draw allegorical narratives out of historical dilemmas, mythical conflicts, and current political crises.
Outset Contemporary Art Fund is an arts charity established in 2003, and based in London, England.
Jeanne Beth Greenberg Rohatyn is the owner of Salon 94, an art gallery with three locations in New York City.
Frances Stark is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, whose work centers on the use and meaning of language, and the translation of this process into the creative act. She often works with carbon paper to hand-trace letters, words, and sentences from classic works by Emily Dickinson, Goethe, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and others to explore the voices and interior states of writers. She uses these hand-traced words, often in repetition, as visual motifs in drawings and mixed media works that reference a subject, mood, or another discipline such as music, architecture, or philosophy.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles, California. Through her art, Akunyili Crosby "negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating collage and photo transfer-based paintings that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds". In 2017, Akunyili Crosby was awarded the prestigious Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Defne Ayas is a curator, educator, and publisher in the field of contemporary art and its institutions. Ayas directed and advised many institutions and collaborative platforms across the world, including in China, South Korea, United States, Netherlands, Russia, Lithuania and Italy. She is known for conceiving exhibition and biennale formats within diverse geographies, in each instance composing interdisciplinary frameworks that provide historical anchoring and engagement with local conditions. Until June 2021, Ayas was the Artistic Director of 2021 Gwangju Biennale, together with Natasha Ginwala.
Liz Magic Laser is an American visual artist working primarily in video and performance. She is based art in Brooklyn, New York.
Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based artist working in performance and installation. Sasamoto has collaborated with visual artists, musicians, choreographers, dancers, mathematicians and scholars, and is co-founder of the nonprofit interdisciplinary arts organization Culture Push. She was appointed as Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art in July 2018.
Kris Lemsalu is a contemporary artist based in Tallinn, Estonia and Vienna, Austria. She studied art at the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Eccentric with color and material, she uses props, costumes, and other natural materials to portray her artwork. In these installations, Lemsalu sculpts an installation that "gives birth to a world of shamanic force, visionary weirdness, and collective revival." By playing with traditions, Lemsalu blurs the origin and scenically removes their dogma. She avoids "concrete labeling, simultaneously showing us the absurdity of as well as the effectiveness of rituals. From this collective transformative euphoria emerges a belief in the possibility of human redemption." "A punk pagan trickster feminist sci-fi shaman, Kris Lemsalu gathers together both collected and crafted objects into totemic sculptures and hallucinatory environments, animated with performances by the artist and her coterie of collaborators;" her work being shown in many places, including Berlin, Copenhagen and Tokyo. In 2015, she participated in Frieze Art Fair New York, where her work Whole Alone 2 was selected among of five best exhibits by the Frieze New York jury.
Tarek Atoui is a contemporary artist and composer who is currently living in Paris. Based on research in music history and traditional music practices, his work reflects the notion of instrument, and how it interacts with listening, composing and performing.
Sozita Goudouna (Greek: Σωζήτα Γκουντούνα is a curator, professor and the author of Beckett's Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts on Samuel Beckett's Breath, one of the shortest plays ever written for the theatre, published by Edinburgh University Press and released in the US by Oxford University Press. According to William Hutchings' review at the Comparative Drama Conference Series 15, Goudouna's book is surely the most ever said about the least in the entire history of literary criticism. In 2022 Goudouna initiated and teaches the MA on Breath Studies: Breath in the Visual and Performing Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and is the editor of the Performance Research Issue On Breath
Raul de Nieves is a multimedia artist, performer, and musician. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Ryan Ponder McNamara is an American artist known for fusing dance, theater, and history into situation-specific, collaborative performances. McNamara has held performances and exhibitions at Art Basel, The High Line, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, The Whitney Museum, MoMA P.S.1, and The Kitchen amongst other places.
Ayana M. Evans is an African-American performance artist and educator based in New York City and an adjunct professor of visual art at Brown University. She also serves as editor-at-large of Cultbytes, an online art publication.
Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly known as Irvin Morazan, is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment to his past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented communities and the cancer community. Maravilla's studio is located in Brooklyn, New York.