Category: Curator
Nationality: South African
Last Year: 9

Performa, New York’s biennial of performance art, grows bigger with each edition and has injected gallons of critical interest into performance – once a ‘hokey-dopey’ area, in the opinion of founder and director RoseLee Goldberg. In its wake, public galleries worldwide have scrambled to programme artist performances. The biennial, taking place in different locations across the city, seemingly gives artists a freer rein than these imitators, and offers a welcome counter to their neat slickness or institutional safety. The 11th edition, launching this month, will include Elmgreen & Dragset’s Happy Days in the Artworld – a Beckettian dialogue in the style of the playwright’s Happy Days (1961) and Waiting for Godot (1953) filtered through Sarah Thornton’s 2008 book Seven Days in the Artworld, in which two artists wait for a Russian oligarch to stop by. This will accompany a highly anticipated array of performance works from the likes of Frances Stark, Ming Wong and Ragnar Kjartansson.