Performa is a non-profit arts organization well-known for the Performa Biennial, a festival of performance art that happens every two years in various venues and institutions in New York City. [1] Performa was founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg. Since its inception 2005, Performa curators have included Defne Ayas, Tairone Bastien, Mark Beasley, Adrienne Edwards, Laura McLean-Ferris, Kathy Noble, Charles Aubin, 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]
Performa 07 was the second edition of the Performa Biennial. Building on the momentum of Performa 05, more than sixty venues and twenty curators joined in invigorating performance art in the city. This edition opened the doors to other disciplines, especially highlighting dance. Performa Commissions expanded its roster with 10 artists creating new work for the biennial including Japanther, Nathalie Djurberg, Carlos Amorales, Sanford Biggers, Isaac Julien and Russell Maliphant, Daria Martin, Kelly Nipper, Adam Pendelton, Yvonne Rainer, and Francesco Vezzoli. Each commission was chosen for an inherent theatricality and a particular use of timing that reflected the potential in working with live performance.
A hundred years after the Futurist manifesto was written, Performa 09 revisited its radical propositions. The third edition of the biennial covered New York City with banquets, exhibitions, street parades, noise concerts, sleep-ins, film screenings and performances. Architecture was an important addition to the biennial with the establishment of Performa Hub, the first architecture commission and a starting point to the matrix of events and discussions happening all around the city.
12 new commissions proposed an alternative view of futurism within the fast-paced world we live in. Each artist produced a work provoking the future including an opening night moving feast, a cell-phone parade, a talk show, a mysterious journey through the Lower East Side, and a musical spectacle based on high-school yearbook photos.
Performa 11 was the fourth edition of the Performa Biennial and covered a range of themes from language to Fluxus to the relationship between visual art and theater. 150 artists were part of the biennial including Elmgreen & Dragset, Mika Rottenberg, Frances Stark, Gerard Byrne, Tarek Atoui, Simon Fujiwara, Ming Wong, Shirin Neshat, Lauren Nakadate and James Franco, Liz Magic Laser, Iona Rozael Brown, Guy Maddin, and Ragnar Kjartansson each of whom presented a new commissioned work. Moving between disciplines and exploring the intricacies of various mediums, artists investigated vocabularies, attitudes, and histories. Russian Constructivism acted as a touchstone in considering performance and shifting between disciplines.
From November 1 to November 24, 2013, Performa 13 transformed New York into the performance capital of the world through live performances taking place in various venues throughout the city. Thirty-five curators and more than a hundred artists from around the world were part of realizing this biennial. Surrealism acted as the historical anchor for this edition of Performa, both in its Parisian mode and in its diasporic form. The new commissioned performances, projects, and talks investigated the concept of voice as an element missing from artists’ performance. This notion of the voice expanded into a discussion on communication across cultures and countries exploring the meaning of “citizenship”.
Performa 15 celebrated a decade of Performa since its conception in 2005. Continuing with the traditions established through the years, the biennial once again examined art across disciplines ranging from visual arts to dance, film, radio, sound, and architecture. Instead of having the works be restricted within a specific subject matter, the spectrum of topics extended across metropolitan life. The history of the Rennaissance acted as an anchor to the research process. Performa 15 also collaborated with the Paris foundation Lafayette Anticipations, setting up headquarters in New York.
In Performa 17, artists dealt with a range of subject matters centering around the use of live performance as central to artistic practice in African art and culture, the intersection of architecture and performance, and the hundred-year legacy of Dada. Performa curators visited Dakar, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, Tangier, Johannesburg and Cape Town as part of the research process examining these urban centers.
The commissions reflected the many different aesthetics, values, cultures, and climates, examining the role of art within them. Yto Barrada, William Kentridge, Tarik Kiswanson, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Julie Mehretu and Jason Moran, Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, Kelly Nipper, Jimmy Robert, and Tracey Rose were among those who participated in the biennial which took place November 1 to November 19, 2017. The Dada movement served as a ‘historical anchor’ for the artists.
The eighth edition of the Performa Biennial took place between November 1 and November 24, 2019. Performa 19 was influenced by the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the first art and architecture school to house a theater class. Examining the Bauhaus’ revolutionary approach to interdisciplinary experimentation, the biennial looked at the intense social and political environment that encouraged the merging of art and life.
Exciting new works created by artists, including Korakrit Arunanondchai,Ed Atkins,Nairy Baghramian, Tarik Kiswanson, Paul Pfeiffer and Samson Young approached performance from unique perspectives. Alongside the commissioned work, the Performa Institute used this exploration to debate the question ‘what is the art school of the 21st century?’ considering how best to equip young artists with ethical and aesthetic tools.
Performa 21, from October 12 to October 31, 2021, was the ninth edition of the biennial and presented performance art outdoors in response to the pandemic. New live commissions took place within the urban landscape of New York City. In previous editions, the Performa Biennial had consistently engaged with the city as a stage, making art directly accessible to the public and challenging the understanding of performance.
Commissions by Kevin Beasley, Ericka Beckman, Sara Cwynar, Danielle Dean, Madeline Hollander, Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation), Tschabalala Self, and Shikeith continued this legacy. Coming together under the same program, these artists considered the changes the city goes through culturally, socially, spatially, racially, and politically. Broadcasting was also used as a medium expanding to Performa TV, Performa Radio, Performa’s online exhibition program Radical Broadcast, and Performa Telethon creating an array of audio and video content.
For three weeks from November 1 to November 19, 2023, the tenth edition of the Performa Biennial presented performance art from 40 artists around the world. Performa 23 subtly underscored a sense of political urgency as artists across mediums delivered environmental, political or cultural critique through their conceptions.
Julien Creuzet, Marcel Dzama, Nikita Gale, Nora Turato, Franz Erhard Walther, and Haegue Yang were the commissioned artists displaying new work produced over the course of two years. In addition, the biennial included the Finnish Pavilion Without Walls, the Performa Hub, launch of the Performa Archives, and a new series titled Protest & Performance: A Way of Life.
The Performa Archive is a full index of all the Performa Commissions, Performa Projects, Performa Institute presentations, publications and projects produced over the past 20 years of Performa’s history as well as all the projects presented by their cultural partners that were part of the Biennial Consortium during the Performa Biennials. Through original and raw edited video and sound recordings, photographs, physical and digital ephemera, as well as artists’ drawings, writings, correspondence with curators, interviews, and research material, the archive is a rich cultural resource representing the most current ideas in contemporary art in all media.
The Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) is an art school of Willamette University and is located in Portland, Oregon. Established in 1909, the art school grants Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees and graduate degrees including the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) and Master of Arts (MA) degrees. It has an enrollment of about 500 students. The college merged with Willamette University in 2021.
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and 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 American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, Mutu now splits her time between her studio there in Nairobi and her studio in Brooklyn, New York, where she has lived and worked for over 20 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.
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 fields of contemporary art and their institutions. Raised in Istanbul and working now between Berlin and New York, Ayas directed and advised a number of art institutes, museums, and collaborative initiatives across the globe, including in the United States, Netherlands, China and Hong Kong, South Korea, Russia, Lithuania, and Italy. Exploring art's role within social and political processes, Ayas is best known for conceiving innovative 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.
Sigrid Pawelke is a German curator and a performance and art historian, regarded as one of the leading experts of the Bauhaus Stage and its influences on the arts in North America. In 2015 she was part of the Black Mountain show at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum of Contemporary Art Berlin, contributing fifteen film interviews of former Black Mountain students. In 2019 she created with Dimitri Chamblas “Unlimited Bodies”, a seven-day interdisciplinary experiment inspired by the radical pedagogies of the Bauhaus for the biennial “PERFORMA 19” in New York.
Africa's Out! is a charitable organization located in Brooklyn, New York, United States, founded by artist and activist Wangechi Mutu in 2014. Africa's Out! uses artists and the community from within Africa and its diaspora, to highlight social and political issues through creative platforms.
Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa is a public non-profit museum in Cape Town, South Africa. Zeitz MOCAA opened on September 22, 2017 as the largest museum of contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. The museum is located in the Silo District at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town. A retail and hospitality property, the Waterfront receives around 24 million local and international visitors per year.
Sozita Goudouna 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.
Adrienne Edwards is a New York–based art curator, scholar, and writer. Edwards is currently the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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.
Brown Arts Institute (BAI) is an institute at Brown University for the practice, theory and scholarship of the performing, literary, and visual arts. Founded in 2016, the BAI is home to the university's six academic arts departments, the David Winton Bell Gallery, and the Rites and Reason Theatre. The BAI structures programmatic offerings including exhibits and lecture series around three-year long rotating themes.
Tarik Kiswanson, born 19 July 1986, Halmstad, is a Swedish, French, Jordanian and Palestinian visual artist. He lives and works in Paris.