more coming soon

Following the thinking of José Esteban Muñoz, the Fall ‘24 PNCA Performance Studio reflects on a year’s worth of performance works with *a fool looks at the finger that points to the sky, an exhibition of ephemera / residual artifacts / evidence of action / traces of liveness.

In the afterlife of a live performance – whose very nature is based on its ephemerality and disappearance (we see you, Peggy Phalen) – we wonder aloud how to prove that what happened, happened. Do our performances reify through its documentation, through the stories we tell about it afterwards, through grades administered by the art institution, through validation from the words of a critic? Here, we draw temporary lines in ever-shifting sands of semantics and declare the existence of our performances through the objects left in their wake. Maybe you had to be there, but the objects left behind beg to differ. We archive our work in the elsewhere our ephemera gesture towards, all the while foolishly yet delightfully relishing in what’s remains.