Figura cuncta videntis (the all-seeing eye) / Homage to Chri

Since 2004 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary has developed an ongoing program of performances and performance-based works in various contexts and, more systematically, in the Relation in Movement series, realized at the Magazin of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin. As live events, performances are time-bound and ephemeral, and in many cases they resist being transformed into autonomous artworks. Often existing or unfolding in between the aesthetic space of art, theater, dance, and film; performer and audience/participant; viewer and viewed; inside and outside; and real and imaginary space, they situate art as a temporal intervention within a specific spatial context. The artifactual residues of the performative are documentary (drawings, writings, records, relics, films) or spatial (environments, sculptural assemblages) or may consist of objects produced “out of actions.” Without the exclamatory gestures of their original agents, the residual objects and documents only partially retain the explosive kinetic energy, tension, humor (more often than not), and exuberance of their original making.