The Histories of Performance.Electric visions. From Nam June Paik to Matthew Barney

MAXXI Auditorium – € 5
four-event subscription – € 15
10 individual seats reserved for myMAXXI cardholders writing to mymaxxi@fondazionemaxxi.it by the day before the event

Five authorial and informative lessons, to recount the evolution of a language that has been able to go through the last decades of with great creativity.

Over the last century, the body of the artist and their actions became central to live art practice, gradually finding their own lexicon within the performance vocabulary. Performance, which has established itself as a non-intermittent, tangible artistic expression of the reflections of conceptual art, has become, over time, the medium through which generations of artists have explored and experimented with the link between the performative dimension and the language of theatre, music, film, the body and nature.

Electric visions. From Nam June Paik to Matthew Barney
With Alessandra Mammì

It is neither cinema nor television, yet it will disrupt the domains of both, producing a language that changes both artist’s films and the very use of television. Since Sony produced the first portable machine in 1960, some artist-pioneers have been using the camera as a weapon to distort visual and television iconography and make a political, intimist, narrative and even sculptural use of it, which will forever change the visual language of exhibitions and the viewer’s perception. Behind this story there are people, experiments, anecdotes and mistakes that are worth telling in order to understand what is left of video art on the liquid screens of the digital era.