The 2025 Commissions
Eight artists have been commissioned to create major new works for Performa 2025. These premieres are the core of the biennial, offering a glimpse into the future of performance by leading visual artists.
Aria Dean
A highly influential artist, writer, and theorist, Dean’s work (often in sculpture and video) dissects the structural logic of race, power, and digital networks. She explores how these systems shape our physical and online realities.
Context for This Performance:
This is a major leap for an artist best known for her conceptual objects and critical writing. Expect a performance that is less about traditional narrative and more about a "live" demonstration of the very systems she critiques. Watch for how she uses performers as "data," "variables," or "actors" within a larger, controlling structure.
Lina LapelytÄ—
A Lithuanian artist and musician who won the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale for the opera-performance *Sun & Sea (Marina)*. LapelytÄ—'s work uses music and song to create witty, potent critiques of contemporary society, identity, and labor.
Context for This Performance:
Staging this work at Federal Hall is a deliberately loaded choice. This building is a historic icon of American democracy and finance. Expect Lapelytė to use her signature style—blending folk music, opera, and everyday speech—to fill this monumental space with voices that question its very authority.
Camille Henrot
The French artist (Silver Lion winner, 2013 Venice Biennale) is celebrated for her restless, associative works, most famously the video *Grosse Fatigue*, which attempts to tell the story of the universe in 13 minutes. Her practice spans film, sculpture, and drawing, all unified by a deep curiosity about anthropology and the "information overload" of modern life.
Context for This Performance:
How does an artist who excels at the rapid-fire, encyclopedic jump-cuts of video translate that energy to the stage? This is a highly anticipated test. She will also be in a public conversation with RoseLee Goldberg at the Hub, a must-see event to understand her thinking.
Sylvie Fleury
A Swiss artist who rose to prominence in the 1990s, Fleury’s work uses the slick language of fashion, luxury brands, and pop culture to critique consumerism, gender, and superficiality. Her high-gloss sculptures (crushed shopping bags, gold-plated cars) are both seductive and sharp.
Context for This Performance:
In an age of Instagram and influencer culture, Fleury's critique is more relevant than ever. Expect a performance that is visually stunning, impeccably "produced," and deeply ironic. It will likely blur the lines between a fashion show, an art piece, and a marketing event, forcing the audience to question their own role in creating "value" and "spectacle."
Diane Severin Nguyen
An artist whose work—primarily in photography and installation—is known for its intense, theatrical, and almost chemical relationship to its subjects. Her images are not "captured" so much as "staged," often depicting figures in moments of intense psychological or physical transformation.
Context for This Performance:
This premiere at BRIC is a critical test of how her meticulous photographic control translates to the unpredictable medium of live performance. Expect a work that is less a story and more a series of living, breathing, and volatile *tableaux vivants* (living pictures).
Tau Lewis
A Canadian-born artist who creates powerful, totemic sculptures from salvaged textiles, found objects, and recycled materials. Her work is deeply invested in material history, spiritualism, and crafting new mythologies for the African diaspora.
Context for This Performance:
This commission at the Harlem Parish suggests a move from creating "sculptures" to creating "beings." Expect her material-rich figures to become costumes, puppets, or spiritual vessels activated by live performers, blurring the line between object and actor in what will likely be a deeply symbolic, ritual-like event.
Ayoung Kim
A South Korean artist who builds intricate, speculative worlds based on data, algorithms, geology, and history. Her work, often in video and text, challenges our sense of linear time and stable identity, presenting history as a series of codeable, "hackable" events.
Context for This Performance:
This work is central to the 2025 biennial's 1920s theme, which explores the link between that decade's media revolutions and our own digital age. Expect a performance where the algorithm itself is a key performer, and live bodies are used to "process" data in a complex, multi-layered narrative.
Pakui Hardware
This Lithuanian artist duo (Neringa ÄŒerniauskaitÄ— and Ugnius Gelguda) creates sleek, futuristic installations that blend synthetic and organic forms. Their work often resembles a post-human operating theater or a sterile laboratory, exploring the relationship between technology, medicine, and the body.
Context for This Performance:
This commission, part of the Lithuanian Pavilion, poses a key question: how do you introduce the "messy," unpredictable live human body into such a clean, surgical, and controlled aesthetic? Expect a cool, detached, and visually precise performance that treats the body as just another "material" to be processed.
Key Figures
Beyond the new commissions, these are the foundational figures, honorees, and historical icons shaping the 2025 biennial.
RoseLee Goldberg
RoseLee Goldberg is arguably the most important figure in the field of performance art history. Her seminal 1979 book, *Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present*, was the first comprehensive text to define the medium and trace its lineage. She founded Performa in 2004 to create a dedicated, large-scale institutional platform for visual artists working in performance, and she remains its chief curatorial visionary.
Julie Mehretu
One of the most celebrated painters of her generation, Mehretu is being honored at the 2025 Opening Night Celebration. This is not just a ceremonial role; Mehretu is a Performa 2017 alumna, where she collaborated with composer Jason Moran on the ambitious performance *MASS (HOWL, eon)*. Honoring her reinforces Performa's core mission: championing performance as a vital extension of a visual artist's practice.
Lucinda Childs
A giant of postmodern dance, Childs is a foundational figure. Her 1964 work *Street Dance* is a landmark of site-specific performance. Its presentation at Performa 2025 (titled *Street Dance (1964-2025)*) is a major historical event. It provides a crucial anchor to the past, allowing visitors to see a foundational work of "live art" in dialogue with the new commissions.
Hub & Project Artists
These artists are presenting major projects, free performances, and site-specific works that are essential to the biennial experience.
Regina José Galindo
A legendary and radical Guatemalan performance artist known for her unflinching, politically charged, and often dangerous endurance works that confront violence and social injustice. A free performance by Galindo is a rare and essential event, offering a direct encounter with one of the most powerful voices in performance art today.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro
The acclaimed architectural firm (known for The High Line and The Shed) is designing the 2025 Biennial Hub at 424 Broadway. This is not just a backdrop; DS+R's work is itself a form of "performance," structuring how bodies move through space. The Hub's design is a work to be experienced in its own right.