This year’s Performa, New York’s performance art biennial, is taking over spaces across the city for projects that, in many cases, will be the artists’ first forays into live performance. The biennial’s main slate of eight commissions includes projects by seven women—Aria Dean, Sylvie Fleury, Camille Henrot, Ayoung Kim, Lina Lapelytė, Tau Lewis and Diane Severin Nguyen—and a male-female duo, Pakui Hardware. “We weren’t trying to make a feminist statement; these are just the artists who came to the fore,” says RoseLee Goldberg, the biennial’s founding director and chief curator. “All these artists are dealing with the issues we care most about, but they’re usually doing it in very subtle, nuanced ways.”
The programme for Performa’s 20th anniversary edition is typically ambitious and wide-ranging. Kim, for instance, will stage her piece The Double at Canyon, a new immersive institution on the Lower East Side. The Korean new media artist’s investigation into the subject of the body double—both in the practice of movie stunt doubles and gaming avatars—will take the form of live motion capture choreography with two performers animating their avatars as well as non-human surrogates such as bicycles, ladders and other digital doppelgangers. (The project coincides with her solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, Delivery Dancer Codex, 6 November-16 March 2026.)
Another multimedia project, by the American artist Diane Severyn Nguyen, involved putting out a call on social media to cast a musical group that will perform remixes and mashups of Vietnam War-era protest songs in a live broadcast performance at Bric in Brooklyn. “Diane initially set out to cast two groups: a Western rock band and a K-pop group,” says Job Piston, a Performa curator-at-large working with Nguyn on her commission, War Songs. “In the end she combined the two into one, 11-person supergroup.”
Descent into hell
Lewis will take a more analogue and ancient approach, with the Canadian artist bringing her distinctive large-scale textile sculptures to life through a staging of the Sumerian epic The Descent of Inanna (around 1900BC-1600BC) at Harlem Parish, a grand Neo-Gothic venue uptown. Lewis’s reimagining of the tale of supernatural mourning is titled No one ascends from the underworld unmarked, and will feature dancers manipulating her sculptures and an experimental opera created in collaboration with the composer Lyra Pramuk.
“Tau sees her sculptures as characters and has been wanting to make some kind of play or performance around them,” says Kathy Noble, Performa’s senior curator, who is working with Lewis on the project.
Lithuanian Pavilion
The biennial will once again have a tranche of projects focused on artists from a specific country, in this case Lithuania, developed in collaboration with the Lithuanian Culture Institute, the local Lithuanian consulate and Lithuania’s Ministry of Culture. This Lithuanian Pavilion includes a project by the sculptor Augustas Serapinas where a wooden shack will be transported around the city, quietly installed at various public locations long enough to host a solo musical or dance performance before being disassembled and relocated.
Lina Lapelytė’s The Speech forms part of Performa’s Lithuanian programme
Photo by Martynas Norvaišas and Nikolas Verseckas
The Lithuanian programme also includes one of this biennial’s most ambitious projects, by Lapelytė, who is collaborating with 270 children aged between five and 17 from the Poly Prep school in Brooklyn. For Lapelytė’s piece The Speech, they will perform the vocalisations of hundreds of different animals, filling Federal Hall—the US’s first capitol building—into a site of interspecies communication.
Goldberg says the process of developing each commission has evolved “with the expertise that grows over time in the ways our team members relate to each other and how we relate to the city”. She adds: “In each case, we’ve asked the artists: ‘What would happen if you went live?’ From there, it’s a process that relies on 100% risk and 100% trust.”
In addition to its marquee commissions, Performa will have a multi-use home base for events, gatherings and performances open to the public daily throughout its run. The Biennial Hub at 424 Broadway has been retrofitted by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro to create a flexible, multi-use space. The hub will also host a new dance programme, Performa Studio, that will feature new, participatory projects by the choreographers Moriah Evans and Isabel Lewis.
- Performa 2025, various locations, New York, 1-23 November
