Performa 2025

Part of the anticipation of Performa Biennial is the prospect of artists who normally work in other media trying their hands at performance. This year’s commissions included artists working on a disparate array of historical and contemporary subjects: Diane Severin Nguyen explored the musical legacy of the Vietnam War, Sylvie Fleury guided us through a constellation of iconic Fluxus performances, Ayoung Kim presented a love story between two delivery drivers, and Pakui Hardware addressed the impacts of AI on mental health. 

Nguyen launched the fortnight with WAR SONGS (all works 2025), a staged concert with a band put together through open call auditions. WAR SONGS traces a line from hits associated with resistance to the Vietnam War, such as Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side” (1964), through to recent, politically void chart-bait like “Party in the U.S.A.” (2009) by Miley Cyrus. Meshing together music that in the 1960s meant something to young American protesters, but today survives on nostalgia and is used as a backdrop for TikTokers enamored with Hippie culture, the songs were arranged with Laszlo Horvath, and the lyrics tweaked and performed in an ironic tone.

The Vietnam War, which has consistently influenced Nguyen’s work, seems to have in this instance prompted her to set the stage as a television production. The point might be to illustrate that while the US continues to ravage countries for their resources, the portrayal of these wars in the popular media has vastly changed. No songs protesting the treatment of Iraqis or Palestinians have achieved the success of Dylan’s anti-war anthems: any such music is now self-released on Bandcamp by underground musicians who don’t have major label funding. Yet the cheerful irony, when placed against the stories of war trauma between songs, left a sense of irritation with both the performance and the world it mirrors.

While Nguyen’s work used video to imply the audience’s implication in the spectacle they were witnessing, Ayoung Kim’s Body^n and Pakui Hardware’s Spores forced the audience to toggle their attention between what was happening on screen and IRL. Kim’s performance, which took place in the new performance and video space Canyon (set to open next year at the Essex Crossing), was a motion-capture love story between two female delivery drivers in a dystopia. The performers, who wrestled and moved in front of the audience, were transported in real time into the videogame world onscreen. While this was an impressive demonstration of the making of Kim’s own video work (the subject of a major exhibition at MoMA PS1), the difficulty of following the narrative between the subtitles, the action on the screens, and the moving bodies meant that it felt underdeveloped as a performance.

Pakui Hardware took a different approach. They displayed a vertical screen, reminiscent of a giant iPhone, on which was the picture of a palm of a hand. The screen was positioned in the middle of a larger interactive installation, and the main protagonist was using an AI tool for a live therapy session, disclosing intimate personal details to which the AI responded in words written—in a playful nod to palm-reading—across the palm on the screen. The use of an unreliable AI tool on our phones for therapy shows how we are constantly turning to them for guidance and validation. The timing of this performance was poignant: the day before it opened, the US government reopened after a prolonged shutdown, having passed a bill raising the cost of health insurance for lower-income Americans, making it more likely that people will seek out DIY healthcare.

Sylvie Fleury’s Instructions for Twilight had a similar layout, with sculptures scattered across the thirty-ninth floor of the WSA office tower in the Financial District. She created an environment oozing with sexy, feminist-coded sculptures referencing her larger oeuvre: deconstructed vintage cars, a phallic pink spaceship. We follow performers dressed in reworked 1960s office wear and stilettos around the space, as they step or sit on, slam, crush, and rub these structures to create texture-driven sound works. Rather than simply being props, the sculptures were activated through conversation with historic Fluxus performances and happenings from the 1960s.

These referents were never made explicit but were possible to make out: Fleury transforms each performance, slipping in and out of history and adding her own twist to the canon. La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 (1960), which states that the performer should “draw a straight line and follow it,” was famously performed by Nam June Paik in Wiesbaden in 1962. His interpretation entailed dipping his head in paint and using it as a “brush” to draw a line. In Fleury’s version, the performer uses a machine that paints street crossings to draw their line, recalling Fleury's long love of vintage cars. Another segment referenced the part of Allan Kaprow’s 1964 happening Household in which women lick jam off a car: Fleury reversed the gender roles, so that a man licked the car while his dom hovered over him.

The performance concluded with a reenactment of Alison Knowles’s great Nivea Cream Piece (1962). Here, the prompt asks the performer to apply a scoop of the cream onto their palms and then massage their hands together in front of a microphone, essentially creating ASMR decades before the internet. Four days before Knowles passed away on October 29, she performed Nivea Cream Piece with her daughter Jessica Higgins and Julia E. Robinson in what they described, on her Instagram page, as “Finale Fluxus.” Fleury’s inclusion of this work was not only a beautiful homage to a pioneer of performance art, but also a reminder that revisiting seemingly simple historical pieces can accomplish a defamiliarization as powerful as anything new. As Viktor Shklovsky wrote in his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” “in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.”1