03/12/2025
12 min reading time
From March 28 to 30, 2025 live at the SCHIRN: A weekend with highlights of international performance art.
A dialog between architecture, body and art
The performative exhibition “Body and Building: 2 Evenings, 2 Days (of Performances)” is a physical appropriation of the SCHIRN. The windows of the empty gallery, which are usually shut, will be opened, and the space will be animated, structured, confronted, and correlated through live performances. This creates a dialogue between art and architecture that examines the human body and the spatial presence that surrounds it. The performers directly confront the SCHIRN’s building: the movement of their bodies engages with and explores the architecture, thereby speaking to the power or strength of a space and of the possibilities of experiencing it, perceiving it, and forming new spatial bodies within it. The exhibition presents fourteen live performances and a section with ten video works.
“In contemporary art, performance has had a more radical development in recent years than almost all other artistic forms of expression.”
Matthias Ulrich
A game with expectations and conventions
One of the exhibition’s central themes is an examination of the conventions of art exhibitions, the expectations regarding an institutional framework, the opening for a viewing public, and the behavior of visitors within an art space. Maria Hassabi’s installation and live performance “White Out” (2023/2025, 50 min.), which takes place on a black-mirrored museum bench, explores the relationship between the living body, the still image, and the sculptural object in space.
In Norma Jeane’s new production “Antibodies” (2025, 60 min.), performers in protective clothing collect dust from the floor and pile it up to form a mound—a dust sculpture. Dust originates with the presence of people, either being transported from the outside into the gallery via clothing or coming directly from one’s skin. Typically invisible, dust is where human bodies and architectural space converge
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The site-specific music-theater “Study of Slope” (2022/2025, 30 min.) by Lina Lapelytė is performed by a choir. These people share a love for singing in spite of being told that they cannot sing. The work is a polyphonic meditation on the question of what is considered beautiful, what is considered valuable, and who is heard. The text is based on the novel Living in a Land by Sean Ashton.
With “Sonatas and Interludes” (2021, 60 min.), Lenio Kaklea proposes a new reading of John Cage’s masterpiece of the same name, written between 1946 and 1948. Accompanied by pianist Orlando Bass, Kaklea’s performance recalls Cage’s little-known collaborations with African American choreographers such as Syvilla Fort and Pearl Primus, as well as other modernist references from cinema, jazz, and musical theater.
The SCHIRN also presents four of the fifty-eight objects from Franz Erhard Walther’s “First Work Set” (1963–1969), which are mostly made of cotton. The objects are held, stretched, or worn by one or more people; it is only through their activation that the work comes into being. This innovative notion of “sculpture as action” makes Walther’s “First Work Set” a key work in the history of contemporary art.
Spatial exclusion and delimitation mechanisms
Questions of spatial boundaries and their overcoming, marginalization or segregation, and safety in public spaces are addressed in several works. Ana Prvački’s work “Tent, Quartet, Bows and Elbows” (2007/2025, 15–20 min.) is at once a sound piece, a performance, and a sculpture. Concealed within a tent, musicians from the Fabrik Quartet play. Their instruments and body parts only become visible as they push against the tent’s surface.
In the site-specific intervention “Hide and Seek” (2023/2025, variable duration) by Alicja Wysocka, a group of Ukrainian women affected by geopolitical displacement interact with the exhibition space. They play hide and seek there, subverting museum conventions and reimagining the space.
Isaac Chong Wai works with performers of Asian descent in “Falling Reversely” (2021/2025, 30 min.). In responding to systemic violence, the work stages a powerful form of solidarity and resistance. The performers reinterpret and reverse movements taken from video recordings of Asian people who have fallen to the ground after being assaulted in public space.
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Some of the performances are narrations specifically devised for the exhibition at the SCHIRN. Adrian Ruth Williams employs conceptual narrative structures through sound and voice, text, moving image, photography, performance, and installation. In the performance “theirself herselves” (2025, variable duration), her voice becomes an outlet for algorithmically determined material in a feedback loop between the human body and machine.
The SCHIRN shows a new production by Irena Haiduk. The intimate cabaret “Night Cast” (2025, 25 min.) creates a fragile sense of space and time, with Dean Kissick in the leading role, accompanied by Christian Schmitz.
Vivid worlds of sound and music
Another thematic focus of the festival is on music and sound spaces. In Astrit Ismaili’s solo performance “LYNX” (2022/2025, 20–30 min.), adapted for the SCHIRN, long threads connect the performing body with metal sculptures and sound bodies. By pulling the threads and using the own voice, Ismaili activates the sounds and interacts with them. The original songs, as well as sound fragments from art, popular culture and politics, touch on themes of tradition and violence, restriction and resistance, desire, fear, and resilience.
Nazanin Noori creates a hypnoacoustic perceptual experience in “Ambient Hardcore“ (2025, 45 min.). Music from the subgenres of dark ambient, contemporary classical, drone, and chant are combined with Sufi devotional music and tracks by the producer. The performance refers to the Sufi state of ḥāl in Islamic mysticism and the deep listening methods of Pauline Oliveros.
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In the site-specific installation “Soft Destructions“ (2022/2025, 60 min.) by Anna Witt, the professional ASMR artist Dori ASMR performs gentle, destructive actions on objects. ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a phenomenon that has become known primarily through social media; it features whispering, tapping, cracking, scratching, and other subtle sounds that trigger a pleasant tingling sensation in the listener. ASMR has also been found to help alleviate stress and anxiety for some. Visitors experience the amplified sounds through headphones, creating a uniquely intimate and immersive atmosphere.
Institutions in the mirror of their power
Another part of the exhibition comprises ten thematically relevant video works, offering a selected overview of performances from the twenty-first century that have been documented on film. Several videos explore the authority wielded by museums and institutions in determining historiography, the reception of art, and the evaluation and recollection of events
The earliest work, which was formative for the exhibition’s conception, is the guerrilla video performance “Little Frank and His Carp“ (2001, 6:08 min.), in which Andrea Fraser visits the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain. Five hidden cameras document Fraser as she strolls through the atrium, listening to the museum’s official audio guide. Her exaggerated reaction to the audio guide’s instructions parodies the museum’s prerogative to shape how art should be viewed.
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Lili Reynaud-Dewar similarly visits and interacts with museums and institutions. Her video works are filmed without an audience, either before the venue’s opening or closing. Monochrome makeup in black, green, white, red, or silver covers her naked body, abstractly emphasizing the formal dimension of her intimate performances of dance movements and “ordinary” activities in these public spaces. The SCHIRN is presenting her work “I Want All of the Above to Be the Sun“ (MAC Montreal) (2023, 32:11 min.).
When Ei Arakawa-Nash became a lecturer at the renowned ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles, he delved deeply into the history of the art school to consider the question of how art can be taught to the next generation of artists. His reflections and exchanges with other art teachers and students informed his work “Here Comes a Cohort, Through a Wind Tunnel“ (2023, 8:44 min.).
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Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa examines how architecture memorializes regimes of power and their accompanying histories of exploitation. In “A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala” (2013, 6:17 min.) three people wear costumes that are modeled on iconic buildings in Guatemala: a Mayan pyramid, a colonial church, and the modernist National Bank of Guatemala. They dance to the Guatemalan folk melody “Cinco Pesos,“ in the process destroying the costumes and buildings.
In his performance piece “European Portraits“ (2017, 20:11 min.), artist Jimmy Robert moves through his same-titled exhibition at PEER Gallery in London, which marked the anniversary of the Brexit referendum. Robert’s body is covered by a large-format piece of fabric emblazoned with a portrait by sixteenth-century painter Bronzino. In texts on the walls, Robert portrays eight people over a period of several years. The work is accompanied by a sound piece by the artist Ain Bailey, and focuses on social and cultural diversity.
Architectures of emptiness and misuse
Videos such as Meg Stuart’s “The Lobby“ (2020, 7:25 min.) address issues of vacancy and the conversion of buildings, as well as their effect on visitors. Here five people enter into a dialogue with the expansive rooms and interiors of the iconic architecture of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, left hauntingly empty during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the work “deader than dead” (2020, 19:39 min.), Ligia Lewis explores the detached attitude of “deadpan.” She develops a choreography for performers who, in their expressive flatness, seem almost lifeless and refuse any narrative or figurative context for their actions. Inspired by the final monologue of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth, the performers chose a modular form to illustrate death, inertia, and emptiness. The performance was realized as a video for the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, due to restrictions stemming from the coronavirus pandemic.
