Performa Exhibition Opening Reception

In anticipation of the Performa Biennial 2025 opening November 1, please join us to celebrate the release of Marcel Dzama’s new edition made exclusively for Performa. The work will be displayed alongside a selection of additional works for sale by Performa Biennial Commissioned artists Tschabalala Self, Sara Cwynar, and James Welling. Each created and gifted by the artists in response to previous Performa commissions. All proceeds will go directly to Performa, enabling future ambitious projects and commissions.

This event also celebrates the launch of an exciting partnership between Performa and Ace Hotel Brooklyn—the hotel of choice for artists and cultural enthusiasts attending the biennial.

—ARTISTS—

Marcel Dzama
This newly released lithograph by acclaimed artist Marcel Dzama relates to The end of gods and monsters (2024), a drawing featured in the artist’s 2025 solo exhibition at David Zwirner Los Angeles. The show presented works depicting fantastical visions of a world where animals, anthropomorphized creatures, and dancing figures appear against dense jungles capes and expansive skies. This print and the drawing use allegory as a critical means of commenting on growing threats to democracy and human rights. Evoking a sense of joy and wonder, these scenes suggest hope and possibility during times of unrest. In 2023, Dzama was commissioned by Performa to create a film and performance; the resulting work, To Live on the Moon (For Lorca), premiered at that year’s Performa Biennial at the Abrons Art Center in New York.

Tschabalala Self
Artspace in partnership with Performa announced a new limited edition print by renowned contemporary artist Tschabalala Self, entitled The Actress Alexis, 2024. Self’s new editions embody the artist’s signature style, characterized by bold colors, dynamic forms, and profound narrative depth. This exclusive edition includes only ten unique prints (the remaining available editions are on display), each with hand-painted finishes. The layered technique used to create the edition underscores Self’s multidisciplinary approach and her
long-standing connection to printmaking in her practice. The Actress Alexis is a portrait of Alexis Cofield, one of the principal actors in Self’s experimental play Sounding Board, commissioned for the Performa 2021 Biennial. The play explores themes of intimacy, control, and interpersonal relations as they intersect with race and gender. Self’s work has garnered significant recognition in recent years and has been included in prestigious exhibitions that have toured internationally such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Barbican Centre, and The Brooklyn Museum.

Sara Cwynar
This special limited edition print by artist Sara Cwynar was created for the Performa 2021 Biennial. Cwynar creates visceral collages and installations by manipulating found imagery taken from advertising, art, fashion, design, and politics, to investigate how popular imagery infiltrates our consciousness, alongside our ever-changing ideals of beauty. Building on the legacy of the Pictures Generation, Cwynar’s use of mass-media imagery simultaneously critiques and celebrates the rapid flow and consumption of images in the digital age, to consider how this material invades our psyche, and structures our lives, both consciously and unconsciously.

Sara Cwynar’s solo exhibitions include: Glass Life, Foxy Production, New York; Source, Remai Modern, Saskatoon (2021); Gilded Age, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2019); Image Model Muse, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN (2018); Soft Film, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2017).). Cwynar’s works are in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York ; Guggenheim, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; MMK
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan.

James Welling
James Welling’s 0521, 2022 is a photograph of ballet dancer David Hallberg kneeling alongside another dancer at his and Francesco Vezzoli’s “Fortuna Desperata,” a Performa Commission for the Performa 2015 Biennial.

Since the 1970s, when he was a student at the California Institute of the Arts, American photographer James Welling has become known for a relentlessly evolving body of images that considers both the history and technical specificities of photography. Emerging at a time when the medium focused on its capacity for mimesis, Welling’s work signaled a break with traditional ideas of photography by shifting attention to the construction of images themselves. While the artist produces discrete series whose subject matter ranges widely, his work is united by an examination of what might be termed “states of being” produced by photographically derived images and how such states are, in turn, read by the viewer.

Welling was born in Hartford, Connecticut. He studied at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh before receiving his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.