Performa is one of those singular New York institutions that accurately define the intersection of art and city life—socially and culturally—in ways few other organizations in the world can replicate. Founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg, the pioneering group was the first to launch a biennial entirely devoted to live performance by visual artists. Since then, Performa has presented the work of over 850 artists at more than 250 venues, positioning performance as a critical and collectible medium in contemporary art, while reinforcing its continuing relevance in an increasingly multimedia-driven landscape. As artists confront the evolving entanglement of language, media and the body, Performa has explored the dissolution of boundaries between disciplines, media, and categories.
As the internationally acclaimed organization prepares to mark its 20th anniversary with the 2025 edition of its biennial—set to unfold across New York City from November 1 to 23—Observer spoke with RoseLee Goldberg about the vision behind what began as a radical experiment and has since become a deeply resonant event, and how it has evolved alongside the shifting role of performance over the past two decades.
Notably, Performa has refused to limit itself to artists already rooted in performance since its inception. Instead, it has invited a broad spectrum of creative minds from across disciplines and cultural contexts, often resulting in special commissions that mark an artist’s first—but rarely final—venture into the performative realm. In doing so, Performa has consistently catalyzed the expansion of artistic practice and inquiry, serving as a platform for new trajectories. More often than not, works that debut on the Performa stage go on to tour major museums or enter significant collections.
True to its mission, the organization commissions entirely new works that fuse theater, dance, architecture, fashion and media—transforming spaces across New York City, from SoHo lofts to the Guggenheim to abandoned banks, into sites for radical, time-based experimentation.
“Everything starts with the commission and a close dialogue with the selected artists to develop the project together,” explains RoseLee Goldberg. “We are very different from the typical biennial, as we begin with commissions. It really starts with the artist, and sometimes we work for a year and a half to develop the project together.”
The Performa 2025 Biennial will premiere eight new commissions by Aria Dean, Sylvie Fleury, Camille Henrot, Ayoung Kim, Lina Lapelytė, Tau Lewis, Diane Severin Nguyen and Pakui Hardware. As always, the focus is not solely on artists already associated with performance but also on those whose practices challenge, expand and transcend conventional boundaries, fostering an evolving interdisciplinary landscape.
Selected artists are generally energized by the opportunity to think on an entirely different level—one that operates outside the demands of the marketplace. Yet even as these artists conceive new works entirely from scratch without any imposed curatorial theme, the program remains deeply rooted in historical research. Goldberg founded Performa was to inform, educate and inspire audiences through the extraordinary history of performance art in the 20th Century—and to create a critical platform for investigating what performance art is and what it will become in the 21st. “It has such an incredible history, but in a way, it was always left out of the history of the evolution of contemporary art,” she says. Each edition of Performa is anchored by a specific historical reference point.
For example, the 2009 edition marked the centenary of the Futurist Manifesto, prompting Performa to research Futurism and related movements extensively. These historical anchors, however, are never the starting point for artist commissions; instead, they offer a broader intellectual framework and contribute to Performa’s ongoing mission to build knowledge around the legacy of performance.
This year, Performa turns its attention to the 1920s—a decade that witnessed the rise of film and new sound technologies, early innovations that ushered in the technological age of the 20th Century. “I was intrigued by how we can draw inspiration from this early period when film and sound were first being explored, especially in experimental cinema,” Goldberg explains. “It’s interesting to investigate how those early innovations already created new ideas about space, and about the visual and virtual relationships between actors on screen and those in real life.” These thematic anchors are compiled into a larger document of selected essays and writings accompanying each edition. “It’s about expanding our understanding of history, ensuring that performance art fills in all these historical gaps and offers different kinds of background.”
Since 2022, Performa has partnered with Amsterdam’s Hartwig Art Foundation, led by curator Beatrix Ruf. Together, they engage in curatorial and archival research on performance worldwide, co-commission new works and tour select productions. The collaboration also supports two Hartwig Art Foundation Fellows at Performa, deepening the exchange of knowledge and practice across institutions.
Interestingly, sound as a theme—and the broader sonic dimension—is also becoming increasingly central in other biennials. Whether through explorations of oral traditions, alternative forms of storytelling, or artists seeking new sensory channels to counteract rising disaffection and attention fatigue, sound is a vital tool for reconnecting audiences to experience in a more embodied, affective way. Performa, as a biennial rooted in performance and operating within a fluid, interdisciplinary field, offers a unique vantage point for observing how artistic mediums are increasingly interwoven—and how society is evolving toward a multimedia model of expression.
For Goldberg, none of this feels new. These interdisciplinary crossovers have long defined the early avant-gardes, which arose in response to radical historical and technological shifts not unlike those we face today. “When you look at the entire 20th Century, it was full of multimedia crossovers,” she notes. “Even going back to the early 1900s in Paris, you see figures like Picasso involved not just in painting, but also in theater, writing, surrealist film, animation, drawing, poetry and collaborative works. It was a moment of rich, interdisciplinary exchange—so much cross-referencing, learning and experimentation happening all at once.”
For Goldberg, the renewed prominence of performance art within an interdisciplinary context is both a symptom and an antidote—an artistic response to the alienation and malaise of our time and the new possibilities of expression and storytelling offered by contemporary media. “I think performance, on one hand, acts as an antidote to the exhausting media matrix we live inside, but in another way, performance art is also the future,” she says. “It allows for so many different kinds of media to be incorporated. It resists fixed definitions. Its very definition is that it’s multi: multimedia, multi-thinking, multidimensional. It’s inherently complex.”
Many of the new works commissioned by Performa this year resonate with Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of the “ethics of ambiguity” in the way they confront the complexity of our time, embracing multiplicity, uncertainty and the coexistence of differing histories and identities shaped by the global circulation of people, products and culture.
New digital realms are often intrinsically linked to performance, offering space to explore and complicate emerging possibilities in a world where the human body is already embedded in digital systems and networks and where people increasingly relate to one another through technology.
Known for her game-inspired multimedia installations in which ancient myths collide with speculative fiction, Seoul-based artist Ayoung Kim is developing a new performance for Performa 2025 that moves fluidly between the choreographed intensity of close-combat martial arts and the recursive logic of game engines. Collaborating with Squid Game choreographer Kim Cha-I (김차이) and drawing inspiration from Girls’ Love manga—a genre centered on romantic relationships between female characters—the performance explores female-to-female dynamics shaped by care, rivalry and self-discovery. It reflects on power, intimacy and the increasingly fluid boundaries between the virtual and real that digital systems shape and sustain. Blurring the lines between physical performance and digital simulation, Kim invites audiences into a speculative space shaped equally by combat and code. Rooted in New York City’s legacy of artistic and technological experimentation, the performance is co-commissioned with support from the Samsung Foundation of Culture.
Goldberg notes that contemporary artists naturally gravitate toward technology—whether of today, the past or the future. “They always have, but it often takes time for them to truly absorb it, flip it, and make it entirely their own, to use it in a way that says something new, something that could only be expressed through that specific technology,” she says, adding that this is rarely literal or didactic. “It’s not about showcasing the technology itself. They’re using it more often as a poetic and political gesture.”
For instance, Berlin-based duo Pakui Hardware’s commission for the Performa Biennial 2025, Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls, will stage a live, A.I.-assisted therapy session framed as a Classical Greek drama. Blending performance and technology, a lead performer engages with an A.I. therapist while a community choir functions as a contemporary chorus, raising questions about the psychological and social implications of digital mental health. Through suspended sculptural design, architectural interventions and immersive soundscapes—from experimental electronica to layered vocal harmonies—the piece promises a critical yet emotionally resonant exploration of the complex relationship between technology, society and emotional well-being.
“Performance art is figurative—because it involves the body,” reflects Goldberg. “At the same time, the performer can be layering history and politics into the work, embedding so much information for the viewer to take in.” Yet for Goldberg, that’s precisely what makes performance art so compelling: the immediacy of being in close relation and interaction—physically, emotionally and psychologically—with an audience, without any filter. “Performance asks us to consider what it brings to the audience, what it assumes about the audience, and how it plays with time,” she explains. “In a way, performance rarely relies on long duration, but it demands attention in the moment,” she continues. “I want people to be there with the artist—in their head, in their presence—to engage fully with the complexity of the ideas being presented.”
Another example is Lina Lapelytė—best known for her unforgettable indoor artificial beach opera Sun & Sea (Marina), which represented Lithuania at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019—who continues her exploration of humanity’s entanglements in a new commission for Performa 2025. Co-commissioned by The Watermill Center, the work investigates how younger generations navigate uncertainty, reinterpret memory and forge new modes of expression in response to a rapidly changing world. At its center is a participatory performance involving middle and high school students, blending role play, vocalization and movement.
Similarly exploring performance as simulacrum and as a parallel stage for examining societal and psychological behavior, Camille Henrot approaches her first-ever live work commissioned by Performa as a living sculptural composition populated by anthropomorphized animals and commedia dell’arte archetypes. Staged against her signature whimsical scenery and drawing from Disney cartoons, slapstick and contemporary urban life, commedia dell’arte unfolds as a surreal, tragicomic narrative. It follows a delivery boy navigating a New York apartment complex, encountering eccentric residents while searching for a struggling artist, in a performance that darkly and wittily satirizes capitalism and the absurdities of modern city life.
Addressing questions of the body and identity and how mass media and mass production have shaped both, Sylvie Fleury continues her four-decade investigation into the language of consumer culture and its role in constructing and commodifying femininity, bringing that reflection into the performative realm. Drawing on the legacy of action-based art, from Fluxus to Happenings, she reimagines iconic scores such as Allan Kaprow’s Women Licking Jam off a Car (1964), staging a series of stylized, absurdist choreographies inside the unfinished concrete shell of a Manhattan skyscraper. Using her sculptures as props and amplifying performers’ movements with contact microphones to create a live-mixed soundscape, each heightened scene of human behavior unfolds against the city skyline, exposing the emotional undercurrents of gendered commodification and our complicity in the spectacle of consumer identity.
In this context, we begin to see how the renewed interest in performance art may also be linked to a broader return to practices and research centered on the body as a form of critical resistance to technological and media alienation, and as an exploration of physical presence as a way to reconnect the body to its surroundings, understood as part of a complex, interdependent ecosystem of relations.
This shift often manifests as a return to a more ritualistic, primordial dimension of art that characterizes many of today’s practices engaging with ancestral traditions and inherited wisdom. These works are not only expressions of identity-seeking, but also speak to a more universal spiritual search for alternative paradigms capable of addressing the current moment’s profound ecological and societal crises.
Tapping into more mystical and ancestral realms of literature, folklore, spirituality and myth, Tau Lewis will stage her first live performance for Performa 2025, inspired by the ancient Sumerian poem The Descent of Inanna (c.1900-1600 BCE), reimagining the myth as a ritual journey of transformation. Interweaving sculpture, scenography, movement and live choral music composed in collaboration with Lyra Pramuk, Lewis channels the spiritual and psychological dimensions of Inanna’s descent into the underworld as a Jungian “hero’s journey” toward self-discovery and rebirth. Specifically conceived to interact with the symbolically charged space of the deconsecrated Harlem Parish neo-Gothic church, the performance will unfold in a lush, immersive environment composed of reclaimed materials—curtains, blankets and bedsheets crafted using Lewis’s signature, material-focused practice. Evoking a sacred space where her sculptures become living characters in an unfolding myth, Lewis explores consciousness, emotion and embodiment across human, animal and object forms. The result is a deeply spiritual performance inviting collective reflection on what it means to be alive, offering a soulful experience rooted in the universal truths embedded in myth.
For Goldberg, ritual is another way of discussing social relationships—a symbolic language of signs and gestures that shapes how we connect. And performance, she suggests, is the contemporary iteration of that impulse. “It’s fascinating to see how each artist engages with this aspect so differently,” she observes. “And then when we talk about technology, this adds another layer, because on one hand, it’s racing through the world, shaping everything we do.”
Known for her poignant cross-media storytelling that investigates how images and media shape identity, power dynamics and geopolitical history, Diane Severin Nguyen will present her first live performance at Performa 2025 by reimagining anti-Vietnam War protest songs in the format of a contemporary televised concert. Blending her cinematic vision with iconic 1960s anti-war anthems, the performance restages them through the stylized language of pop music broadcast. By deconstructing these familiar songs, Nguyen explores how the aesthetics of resistance continue to shape contemporary ideals of truth and freedom—while probing the afterlives of protest and the distortions of nostalgia. “Whether protest must inherently remain analogue? What different kinds of pleasure are found in sympathizing with the Other?” she asks—questions that run throughout the work. Co-produced with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, this multifaceted commission includes a new musical album by an art band and a live broadcast performance.
To bring the album to life, Nguyen is working with a cast of untrained performers sourced from YouTube, TikTok and local magnet schools. At the same time, the final performance will center on live audience interaction: using call-and-response techniques and pre-recorded sound clips of audience behavior, the piece becomes a visually and sonically immersive experience staged in a broadcast studio with a live audience. Prompts will trigger real-time reactions, playing with anticipation and expectation, and turning the audience into an active part of the production. Through this approach, viewers engage with history as participants, redefining collective experience through the medium of performance itself.
Although best known for her sculpture, conceptual work and writing, Aria Dean has increasingly turned to video to explore how power and subjectivity—particularly Black subjectivity—are shaped through media, history and form. In her commission for Performa, Dean uses the slippage between fiction and reality, video and live performance, to stage a speculative encounter between Harlem Renaissance figures Alain Locke and Claude McKay in Berlin’s Tiergarten in 1923, during the racist “Black Shame” campaign targeting Black French colonial troops. Rather than reenact their conversation, Dean embraces the suspension of disbelief afforded by the stage to invent it—treating historical absence as a space for critical reflection. On a nearly empty stage, two pseudo-fictional characters echo the gestures and philosophies of Locke and McKay, while live cameras and layered rear projections create a dense, media-driven mise-en-scène. A virtual reconstruction of the Tiergarten—rendered in Unreal Engine—serves as a shifting, immersive backdrop for a philosophically charged theatrical exploration of memory, history and Black aesthetic expression.
It’s clear that Dean’s commission—like many others in this edition of Performa 2025—embraces the fluid and interactive nature of the open-ended, audience-responsive framework for live performance to examine the fraught relationship between aesthetics and politics, and more broadly, between art and “the people.”
Throughout the conversation, it’s clear that Goldberg remains intensely hands-on and directly involved in every stage of Performa’s operations, from organizational strategy to artistic conception and production, as well as the complex fundraising and logistical negotiations required to secure venues across a city as competitive and high-cost as New York. Over the years, however, Performa has built a reputation that strengthens its cultural capital and serves as a draw for the city itself—bringing visibility and vitality to overlooked or underutilized spaces. “We love using the city as our stage, but I like that we always begin with the artist—very often, the actual space is the final piece of the puzzle,” Goldberg explains. “I often use the metaphor of finding the perfect frame. You create what goes inside the frame first, and then you find the frame that enhances it, bringing out its key qualities. So in that sense, it’s even the opposite of site-specific.”
For Goldberg, what Performa enacts is a form of “radical urbanism,” closely aligned with the ideas of happenings and urban actions theorized by the Situationists in the 1970s. Its generative and creative impact on the city invites audiences to see familiar places in new ways or discover unfamiliar ones. Most of the performances are co-produced in partnership with presenting organizations and performance venues, both in New York and internationally, but each collaboration is carefully chosen to align with the artist’s vision and to reflect the surrounding context, atmosphere and urban environment.
That said, none of this comes without challenges—especially on the fundraising side. As Goldberg notes, each biennial involves a two-year process. “This is about the world of ideas, and we’re deeply committed to realizing the artist’s vision,” she emphasizes. “It’s about inviting people to be actively involved. After all, you can watch someone paint in a studio, but in this case, people can support a project and witness it unfold over time. That’s what makes it so exciting.”
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