Curated by RoseLee Goldberg

When the inaugural edition of RoseLee Goldberg’s performance art biennial was announced six years ago, few would have predicted its level of popular success, the medium having long ago settled into place on the art world’s fringes. Since then, performance art has experienced both a rise in its institutional representation and an extension into new realms—witness Marina Abramović’s MoMA performance broadcast live via webcam and Flickr feed, and LA MoCA’s promotion of James Franco’s General Hospital crossover as a performance piece. Perhaps this expansion owes something to Performa, which demonstrated the possibility for performance art, in all its guises, to engage a broader audience. Spanning more than eighty venues and featuring twelve new commissions (by Elmgreen & Dragset, Simon Fujiwara, Shirin Neshat, Frances Stark, and others) along with works selected according to the theme of “Language, Translation, and Misinformation,” Performa 11 will continue to push the medium toward center stage.

— Lloyd Wise