Aperture: Performance

Envisioning the intersections of photography and performance.

This issue, a collaboration between Aperture and Performa, the nonprofit organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in visual art, takes a capacious approach to considering the intersections of photography and performance.

In the Words section, Tate curator Simon Baker traces the impulse to perform for the camera throughout photographic history; New Museum curator Lauren Cornell looks at how artists such as K8 Hardy, Juliana Huxtable, and Amalia Ulman use social media to calculated effect; Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg and MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci discuss performance, documentation, and the ways in which performances are crafted for the camera; and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie explores the lecture-performance form in the work of Lebanese artists Walid Raad, Rabih Mroué, Lina Saneh, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige.

In the Pictures section, Delfim Sardo considers the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida’s Inhabited Painting(s) and other works; Brian Sholis on the disquieting appeal of Torbjørn Rødland’s images; James Welling introduces his new series Dance Project; Olu Oguibe on Samuel Fosso’s recent Mao Zedong series; Brian Dillon on Dru Donovan’s recreations; Performa curator Adrienne Edwards on how Carrie Mae Weems animates minimalism; a look at the role of image research in the Hong Kong-based duo Zheng Mahler’s Performa 15 debut performance; and Kristin Poor explores two approaches to photographing dance, by looking at Barbara Morgan’s enduring images of Martha Graham, and Babette Mangolte’s photographs of Trisha Brown’s dance performances.