Movies: Performance art

Art dealer Salvatore Viviano and director Angela Christlieb embark on a search for the lost artist collective Gelitin, which since the 1990s has shattered the borders of "good taste" again and again with extravagant actions and installations. Intervi...

A loner artist with a history of abuse meets a beautiful woman who takes an interest in his life and work; leading to a chilling path of tragedy....

Nobody captured the atmosphere of 1990s Berlin better than German photographer Daniel Josefsohn, who died in 2016 at the age of 54, leaving his mark in advertising with his irreverent aesthetic and punk sensibility. It was his spontaneous, imperfect ...

An unsuccessful playwright faces trials and tribulations as he seeks to find himself in New York City....

Five mechanized performances of Survival Research Laboratories, 1985-1986. 70 min. of endless pursuits, unavoidable captures, and merciless punishments....

A gay man living through the HIV/AIDS crisis reflects upon his recent history of loss with the help of his grandmother, who tells him a story of her own trauma and loss during the Jim Crow-era South....

Living in a fictional world all their own, the machines of Survival Research Laboratories act out scenarios of perpetual torment, exasperating consumption, and tragic recognition...

My Trip to Miami follows a well-meaning, misguided, tourist as he tries to self-actualize via Trip Advisors algorithmic script. My Trip to Miami is a documentation of a fantasy, a failure in image-based expectations....

Summer 1991. The last days of the Soviet Empire. Dark clouds gathered over Moscow as the Soviet government prepared to turn back the clock of history. While the world focused on the crashing Soviet Empire, this film focuses on the people who would've...

McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in clichés, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speech — a short TV show in which nothing is r...

A mockumentary following an ambitious TV network executive trying to produce a controversial reality show where contestants play Russian Roulette....

The 1988 European tour of Survival Research Laboratories, with shows in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. SRL ferrets out and gleefully satirizes assorted icons of cultural pride in two of Europes more allegedly libertarian democracies....

Balkan Baroque is a real and imaginary biography of the Yugoslavian performance artist Marina Abramovic. Rather than a mechanical reproduction of the artist's work, the film tries to create a new reality by translating the performances into cinematog...

A tough sailor, Fotis, returns to Greece to marry his beloved and to settle certain inheritance issues with his twin brother Fifis, who is an effeminate artist. Their striking resemblance will upset the lives of both of them equally....

Bas Jan Ader rides his bike into a canal in Amsterdam....

The video revolution of the 1970s offered unprecedented access to the moving image for artists and performers. This Is Not a Dream explores the legacies of this revolution and its continued impact on contemporary art and performance. Charting a path...

A fast-moving and comprehensive documentation of three Survival Research Laboratories performances 1989-1990. Includes "Illusions of Shameless Abundance ...", ArtSpace Computer-Controlled Installation, "A Carnival of Misplaced Devotion ...", plus det...

Bas Jan Ader's first fall film shows him seated on a chair, tumbling from the roof of his two-storey house in the Inland Empire....

Filmed live at the Wilbur Theater in Boston, the self-proclaimed sweatiest woman in show business brings you her first ever standup special. Told in three acts and influenced heavily by her loves of surrealism and Russia, with multiple scripted sketc...

One of a series of ‘falls’ by Bas Jan Ader that he recorded on film, this work was filmed in West Kapelle, Holland in 1970....