Performance Art Reviews

Keeper of the Flame

November 12, 2024
By Gaby Cepeda
Roksana Pirouzmand at Vernacular Institute
Mexico City, Mexico

For her first solo exhibition in Latin America, the artist flirted with disaster, presenting four kinetic installations made with flames, tears, and rocks.

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Formas de morir

October 29, 2024
By Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa
Paloma Contreras Lomas at the National Autonomous University of Mexico
Mexico City, Mexico

Invoking forgotten and foreboding specters, the artist intimated that death will always be with us, and no amount of wealth or power can enable us to avoid it. 

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Rid all Disturbance

October 15, 2024
By Sophia Weltman
Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers
Los Angeles, California

In her parodic performance, Nora Turato deployed mantras from wellness discourses to lay bare the absurdity and cultish appeal of commodified self-care practices.  

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Tabi Tabi Po

October 2, 2024
By June Miskell
Justin Talplacido Shoulder at Rising Festival
Melbourne, Australia

Justin Talplacido Shoulder creates shapeshifting lifeforms from ancestral and queer mythologies, generating a performative space beyond geographical borders.

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Structures People Lived In

September 18, 2024
By Dahlia Li
Michele Rizzo at MoMA PS1
New York City, NY

Are museums or clubs more amenable to the duration of difference? The former’s conditions of entry and existence reveal the racial politics of dance. 

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Fingers Crossed

September 3, 2024
By Michał Grzegorzek
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins at Palazzo Contarini Polignac
Venice, Italy

Can intimate gestures save us from annihilation? Alex Baczynski-Jenkins’ performance suggests that solidarity and courage can be created with just our fingertips.

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Climate Change in Our Daily Lives

August 20, 2024
By Lynda Tay
Sun & Sea at the Singapore International Festival of Arts
Singapore

Sun & Sea, an opera on an artificial beach, reminds us that the reality of climate change is an unsettling truth that permeates every aspect of our lives.

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The cult of deformance

August 6, 2024
By Santiago Villanueva
El Pelele at Galería Sendrós
Buenos Aires, Argentina

With his performance as a frightening clown, El Pelele channels the underground performances of 1980s Argentina and muddles the boundaries between ridicule and deformity.
 

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A Temple of Dreams

July 16, 2024
By Rebeka Põldsam
Sveta Grigorjeva at Sõltumatu Tantsu Lava 
Tallinn, Estonia

Through a choreography that mixes touch, twerking, and other dance and poetic genres, Sveta Grigorjeva’s most recent performance defies gender and ethnic prejudices by inviting the audience to imagine a world without wars.

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Deaths, Revisited

July 9, 2024
By Raymond Kyooyung Ra and Alice Siyuan Zhao
Blacklips Performance Cult at the University of Southern California 
Los Angeles, California

Assembled in New York City in the early 1990s, the maverick queer collective Blacklips Performance Cult reunited earlier this year at the University of Southern California to relive their experimental theatre, music, and artistic productions. 

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Proof of Life

July 3, 2024
By Andrew McNeely
Linda Franke at The BOX Gallery
Los Angeles, California

By highlighting the mass fatigue that typifies daily life and pervasive burnout culture, Franke reminds us that disassociation can also be a form of productive refusal.

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Loosely Ballroom

June 18, 2024
By Rossen Ventzislavov
Lionel Popkin at REDCAT
Los Angeles, California

Rather than presenting an exoticized “mirage of authenticity,” Lionel Popkin’s artworks and performances offer only a fragmented picture of what is normally presented to western audiences in tight focus.

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No End Goal

June 13, 2024
By Antonia Blocker
Coumba Samba at Cell Project Space
London, United Kingdom

Indebted to male-dominated sports like football, Senegalese Laamb wrestling, and Queimada, a Brazilian version of dodgeball, Coumba Samba’s performance ascribes value and meaning not only to the action or performing bodies themselves, but to what, or who, is left behind.

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Shrimps, Sounds, Lines

June 4, 2024
By Nicole M. Nepomuceno
Aki Sasamoto at Para Site
Hong Kong

Accompanying improvised actions with personal anecdotes, Aki Sasamoto’s performance suggests that one does not exist in isolation but is intimately tied to those around them. 

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A Letter to Inaction

May 21, 2024
By Tram Nguyen
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley at Studio Voltaire
London, United Kingdom

Will you take action when you see someone in danger or in need? Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s artworks confront our collective inaction in a world that enacts violence towards Black and Brown Trans bodies.

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Breathtaking: Decolonizing Mastery

May 14, 2024
By Ariana Chaivaranon
Wayan Sumahardika at Mulawali Institute
Bali, Indonesia

The (Famous) Squatting Dance subverts a colonial gaze that sees “authenticity” as locked in the past and experimental contemporary performers as “rule breakers” of tradition rather than the progenitors of future cultures. 

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Spirit Healing

May 6, 2024
By June Miskell
HOSSEI at Verge Gallery
Sydney, Australia

Dive into the artist’s underwater world with playful and inquisitive characters inspired by aquatic creatures like the strange and singular sand dollar.

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Feeling Seen

April 23, 2024
By Andrew Kachel
Kellian Delice at Pageant
New York City, NY

Kellian Delice reworks a national anthem and its ideologies.

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A nuestra energía

April 15, 2024
By Roselin Rodríguez Espinosa
Sofía Cabrera López at Ex Teresa Arte Actual
Mexico City, Mexico

Critiquing exploitative expectations of labor, the artist facilitates a collective call for rest.

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Rituals of Mourning

March 26, 2024
By Nahui Garcia
Karla Ekaterine Canseco dances between realms in an ode to a dying car. How to mourn (a machine)
Los Angeles, California

Oil is both mechanical and spiritual substance in Canseco’s hypnotic performance.

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Vedette and Mesoamerican Iconography

February 27, 2024
By Laura G. Gutiérrez
Carmina Escobar’s Naque Caníbal: Iris Chacón and Tlazoltéotl
Los Angeles, California

A sensual creature emanating a siren-like chant, accompanied by piano strokes coming from atop the stage-cum-temple, made her way across the open dance floor, which doubled as an ephemeral cabaret and sacrificial site.

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Not Not Performance Art

February 21, 2024
By Rossen Ventzislavov
Krump Session with Qwenga
Los Angeles, California

Krumping might not be performance art, but there is wisdom to be drawn from the analogy.

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Rebeldía en una Danza de los Diablos

February 19, 2024
By Gemma Argüello Manresa
Rebellion in a Dance of the Devils
New York City, NY / Mexico City, Mexico

Guadalupe reclaims what she calls “the primary African community” and pointed out that in that community they are considered “elderly,” in the sense that they acquired wisdom in life.

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