© Simon Faithfull, Going Nowhere 2, 2011
Art project
How performance art challenges the way we speak about human beings and the living world, as well as the sociocultural and political dimensions that seem to define it. Performance practice spans an interdisciplinary and "multimedial" breadth, encompassing experimentation across video, photography, choreography, sound, installation, and live work.
What’s Happening
To perform is a way of transforming energy and bringing it into being as something singular — what one might call an event. An event insofar as it opens up horizons, produces effects, and invites interaction with the audience. The first experience of energy is that of the body. The body has been at the heart of video art since the very beginnings of this visual practice, which emerged in the 1960s in the wake of Body Art and under the influence of Black Mountain College — a hub bringing together multiple practices such as happenings, performance, photography, video, body modification, and multimedia. Video became a space for experimentation, one that began with learning to digitally capture physical presence, and continued through the dynamic exploration of both the artist’s body and that of the viewer. If performance is undeniably entangled with the origins of video art, it is because both combine thought, action, and speech within frameworks of expression and meaning-making.
The Power to Act / to Speak
The act of performing is a form of power. A power that enables the reassessment of our mediated presence, of each person’s relationship to and way of being in the world, of the common, and of giving body to voice. It is in this way that the freedoms and constraints of the body are placed within the image as living forces and forces of resistance. This « integrity resistance » — which drives the uprising of bodies and through bodies — finds expression in the artistic gestus. In the period we are living through, the resurgence of the body, in times of crisis and fracture, is the banner that reasserts the power to exist. The performed body is the will to speak, the action, and the agnostic transmission of our voices. Since the twentieth century, artistic collaborations have given rise to a diversity of powerful works, driven by exchanges between visual arts, music, dance, and language. Through these varied processes, a constant reinvention of multiple identities, norms, boundaries, and ways of becoming continually redefines the notion of presence, absence, and the in-between.
Performativity reveals the consistency — and indeed the absurdities — of our worlds, in which we are called toward Transformation, Mutation, and Hybridization. The list of gestures is long: disassemble, reassemble; deconstruct, reconstruct; agree, become; enunciate, renounce; deplore, explore; deterritorialize, land; dismember, remember; show, demonstrate, (…); see, perceive; explain, implicate; form, perform; and so on. The potential of performative action is not singular — it can be, above all, interactive and participatory.
What the Body Can Do
Performative action is not singular — it can be, above all, interactive and participatory. From the video art of the 1960s to today’s social media, the central question is the representation of the performance of the self. How does the production of the image shape what we are, and what does the body do to the image? How is the invention of self and others constructed, amid a deep confusion of powers and a contestation of dominant authorities, and in the midst of the decline of the « grand narratives » of both hyper- and post-modernity? What is at stake, then, is the construction of ways of seeing and of new forms of storytelling. The video image of performance is the point of mediation between the artist, the viewer, and the world.
Exploration in performance is an investment in what the body is capable of. This body — held between tension and intensity — is our becoming within the fragmentation of history. The use of gesture, presence, and sound carries us into a precious relationship with knowledge (and its opposite) and with its transmission. The power of performance is a nervous system of making visible and making speakable, of thought and action. The register of performance is a repertoire of relations between beings — a means of circumventing the modus vivendi of atomization, domination, and stupefaction, and of working to mobilize our bonds. The body is therefore this link, if not the very vehicle, toward World 2.
Performed Bodies
And so, for this inaugural edition of OVNi in Biennale format, the intention is to bring bodies forth as event — reaching back to the very origins of video art. The OVNi Biennale, conceived as an atmospheric refractor, is the possibility of forming a body together and of ensuring that — in our coexistences — we breathe as one. Everything in the world seems to hang on a breath. A breath that is sometimes raw, sometimes silent. And yet, the body is movement, that life force which, wherever it is not compelled to be, has the quality of being vibrant. This force is the art of conducting one’s own body — as choreographer Pina Bausch was fond of saying — it is the art of leading one’s life, of being alive in the world.
Nathalie Amae,
Artistic Director OVNi,
Biennale 2026