With the exhibition Performa Archive, CC offered a rare glimpse into the legendary works created for and performed at the performance biennial Performa in New York. In a weekly film programme visitors could experience the documentation of some of the most prominent contemporary performances created by renowned artists including Elmgreen and Dragset, Yvonne Rainer, and William Kentridge.

With the exhibition Performa Archive, CC marked Performa’s indisputable significance for the development and propagation of performance art within the past two decades. The exhibition offered Danish audiences a unique opportunity to get to know some of the most prominent performance works created during the period 2005-2017.

Performa Archive presented thirty full-length recordings spread over a week, all selected from more than seventy specially commissioned works in the Performa archives. During the week visitors could experience a wide range of performance art, for instance Elmgreen and Dragset’s humorous and dark institution-critical work Happy Days in the Art World (2011) and Yvonne Rainer’s dance performance RoS Indexical (2007), a reinterpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring. Visitors could see and listen to Ragnar Kjartansson’s twelve-hour-long opera Bliss (2011) or the composer Arnold Schönberg’s German musical comedy Erwartung, restaged by the South-African Robin Rhode and performed at Times Square in 2015.

For the first time in an exhibition context, recordings of works from Performa 17 were shown, including William Kentridge’s expressive interpretation of Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonate and the South-African Kemang Wa Lehulere’s extensive performance I cut my skin to liberate the splinter, an encounter of sound and movement inspired by African children’s games. Kemang Wa Lehulere’s work was later acquired by Tate Modern, London, for its collection.

About Performa

Performa was founded as an organisation in 2004 by the acclaimed art historian RoseLee Goldberg whose time-honoured research into performance art has proved epoch-making for the genre. As the leading organisation dedicated to research into performance art, Performa addresses the role of this art form in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the heart of Performa is the biennial of the same name, forming the context for interdisciplinary works and special events involving dance, film, music, and architecture. Every other year in November, New York is transformed into the ’capital of performance art’ where visitors can explore the city and the pioneering performances – a wholly unique art scene.
For each Performa event, new works are commissioned, developed specifically for the biennial by artists from a variety of disciplines. With these commissioned works, Performa often invites artists who have not previously worked with this art form to create performances for the first time. Over the years, some of the most influential names in contemporary art and performance have been engaged and invited to create works in new formats and explore new directions.

Since ​​New York’s first performance biennial in 2005, the organisation has established its identity as a commissioning and producing entity. Like a museum without walls, Performa is a vital platform for presenting and developing the live art forms. The biennial attracts a huge national and international audience with more than 200,000 visitors. Since 2005, Performa has presented almost six hundred works, collaborated with seven hundred artists, and toured with works in twenty countries.

The exhibition at CC was made possible in collaboration with Performa, New York, and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. In 2017 Whitechapel Gallery presented the exhibition Commissions from Performa’s Archives: 2005-2015.

Edgar Arceneaux, Jérôme Bel, Sanford Biggers, Candice Breitz, iona rozeal brown, Elmgreen and Dragset, Omer Fast, Tori Wrånes, Christian Jankowski, Isaac Julien, Jesper Just, Wyatt Kahn, Mike Kelley, Jon Kessler, Ragnar Kjartansson, Arto Lindsay, Liz Magic Laser, Russell Maliphant, Oscar Murillo, Kelly Nipper, Adam Pendleton, Yvonne Rainer, Raqs Media Collective, Robin Rhode, Mika Rottenberg, Francesco Vezzoli, William Kentridge, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Yto Barrada, Brian Bellot, Kris Lemslau, Jimmy Robert, and Mohau Modisakeng.

Perspectives on Performance is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.