Movies: Performance art

In 2003, Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh became the first World Champion of Chessboxing. This brain-busting combination of alternating rounds of chess and boxing was in fact an art performance calling for more balance in a world of extremes, and the audien...

Feature documentary on the pioneering life and work of iconoclastic filmmaker/musician/composer/artist Tony Conrad....

Dirty Martini and Tigger!, stars of the New York underground scene, reveal some of the secrets of their provocative and remonstrative forms of artistic expression in New York’s Off-Off-Broadway. Meanwhile, they will help us to understand from their e...

Welcome to the temple of fear and eroticism, as a monstrous madman slowly mutilates poor young girls! See the sensual act of voodoo performed on an innocent bar patron! View the lustful bite of a vampire!...

The definitive documentary that reviews the enormous career of Esther Ferrer, one of the great Spanish creators in the performance genre. A "hybrid" between the documentary and the discipline of performance itself, between recording and creation, whi...

Thirty years after their separation, performance artists Marina Abramović and Frank Uwe 'Ulay' Laysiepen (1943-2020) agree to meet, for the first time on camera, for a raw and honest conversation about their life, art and legacy....

A young drag queen from Andalusia exposes the difficulties of adding aspects of her homeland culture to her artistic expression....

This short film is part of a mixed media artwork of the same name, which also included postcards of Ader crying, sent to friends of his, with the title of the work as a caption. The film was initially ten minutes long, and included Ader rubbing his e...

"Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity" says the bible. The word flows from the tongue naming the pleasure of earthly life and judging it as beautiful, but shallow and useless; vanity is a deadly sin. A female sin. The man painted the woman, put a...

Marina Abramović Freeing the Body was performed at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, where Abramović began dancing frantically to the sounds of a bongo player. During the early part of the performance, she still has plenty of energy, and she r...

Performance art. Two men are stuck in an enclosed space....

Cracking open the human-camera body....

Nobody captured the atmosphere of 1990s Berlin better than German photographer Daniel Josefsohn, who died in 2016 at the age of 54, leaving his mark in advertising with his irreverent aesthetic and punk sensibility. It was his spontaneous, imperfect ...

"What we were trying to do was the ultimate form of architecture, which was predicting how society would use space, land and time." Curtis Schreier, ANT FARM Space, Land and Time: Underground Adventures with Ant Farm is the first film to consider the...

In 2012 two members of anarchistic female band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a Mordovian labor camp for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred". Russian film collective Gogol’s Wives follow each step of the feminist punk band’s battle...

Dragphoria is a short film about drag and identity, finding yourself in a noisy crowd, and slowly accepting yourself after a long-awaited denial....

A gay man living through the HIV/AIDS crisis reflects upon his recent history of loss with the help of his grandmother, who tells him a story of her own trauma and loss during the Jim Crow-era South....

A sincere portrait, and in first person, of the multifaceted Andalusian artist José Pérez Ocaña....

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Struct...

November 19, 1971, F Space, Santa Ana, California: “At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend”....