The Third Biennial of New Visual Art Performance
New York City,
November 1-22, 2009
PERFORMA
100 West 23rd Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10011
+1 212 366 5700
info [at] performa-arts.org
Performa 09, the third biennial of new visual art performance, will be held in New York City from November 1-22, 2009. The three-week city-wide festival will feature new Performa Commissions and an exciting program of performances, exhibitions, educational forums, film screenings, and radio and television broadcasts. Presented with a consortium of arts institutions and a network of public and private venues across the city, Performa 09 will showcase the work of approximately 100 artists in collaboration with over 25 curators — institutional and independent — in a lively, performance-driven “festival as think tank” that will be a catalyst for envisioning New York City as “the city of the Future”.
Performa 09 will mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” in 1909, which launched the most provocative and cross-disciplinary artistic movement of the twentieth century, bringing some of the radical propositions of the Futurists a century ago back to life in unexpected ways. Using the Futurist template of manifestos-for-the-future in all disciplines, Performa 09 will explore exciting new ideas in visual art, film, music, poetry, graphic design, dance, architecture, and urbanism. The city of New York itself will be featured as an evolving ignition of ideas, its streets, transportation, and airwaves providing a platform for public engagement and inspiration. Following the biennial, several Performa Commissions will tour to venues in Milan, Mexico City and Shanghai. The countdown to Performa 09 will begin with a special Futurist Banquet on February 20th — the date, one hundred years ago, of the publication of the original manifesto on the front page of Paris’s Le Figaro — featuring an inventive menu of recipes from Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook (1932), live music, and performances celebrating this historic occasion.
ABOUT PERFORMA
Performa, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization established by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, is dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty-first century. Performa launched New York’s first performance biennial, Performa 05, in 2005, followed by Performa 07 in 2007.
Performa is supported by grants from the Toby Devan Lewis Philanthropic Fund, The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, the David & Elaine Potter Charitable Trust, Bloomberg L.P., the Korea Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Helena Rubenstein Foundation, the Starry Night Fund of the Tides Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Performa Board of Directors, the Performa Producer’s Circle, the Performa Visionaries, and many generous individuals. Public support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Council for the Humanities, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
More information is available at www.performa-arts.org.
