Unbound: Performance as Rupture

THE JULIA STOSCHEK FOUNDATION PRESENTS AN EXTENSIVE GROUP EXHIBITION IN BERLIN WITH 41 WORKS BY 36 ARTISTS THAT TRACE THE INTERSECTION OF PERFORMANCE AND VIDEO FROM THE 1960s TO TODAY.

The group exhibition Unbound: Performance as Rupture examines how different generations of artists have called upon the body in relation to the camera to refuse oppressive ideologies, disrupt historical narratives, and unsettle concepts of identity. Setting works from the Julia Stoschek Collection in dialogue with loans, the exhibition traces various intersections of performance and video art from the late 1960s to today, focusing on how they create specific forms of rupture, fracture, and pause. 

In contrast to Peggy Phelan’s definition of performance as a live art characterized by its immediate disappearance, Unbound centers the use of the camera and its apparatus to record and direct the performance itself. By willfully conflating the presence of performance and the virtuality of the image, the artists question a fundamental paradox—or representational gap—between the performing subject, whose complex identity can never be depicted fully, and the camera as a violent tool that tries to capture, contain, and classify them. Many of these works expose and negate the colonial gaze perpetuated by the camera, while simultaneously utilizing time-based technologies, in order to create otherwise impossible connections across spaces and temporalities. In addition to performance documentation and performance-for-the-camera, the exhibited artworks offer investigations into contemporary image economies that draw attention to how bodies move through or evade physical and digital spaces.

Performance introduced a rupture in the Western understanding of art in the mid-twentieth century by obscuring the distinction between art object, artist, and action. This unbinding of art through the body and vice versa drives the diverse approaches of the works on view. 

Panteha Abareshi, Eleanor Antin, Salim Bayri, Nao Bustamante, Matt Calderwood, Peter Campus, Patty Chang, Julien Creuzet, Vaginal Davis, Ufuoma Essi, Exterra XX, VALIE EXPORT, Harry Gamboa Jr., Cao Guimarães, Shuruq Harb, Sanja Iveković, Joan Jonas, Stanya Kahn, Tarek Lakhrissi, Klara Lidén, mandla & Graham Clayton-Chance, Senga Nengudi, Mame-Diarra Niang, Lydia Ourahmane, Christelle Oyiri, P. Staff, Manfred Pernice, Sondra Perry, Howardena Pindell, Pope.L, Pipilotti Rist, Katharina Sieverding, Akeem Smith, Gwenn Thomas