BASEL.- It is hard to know when, exactly, visual artists first started to deploy performance as an art form. Some locate its origins in the early twentieth century, in the Futurist and Dada movements, while others identify its proper inception in the 1960s and 1970s, when the term came into wide use in the art world. Since those beginnings, increasing numbers of artists have embraced performance, with particular fervor in Switzerland. From the anarchic events of the Dada group in Zurich to the machinic actions of Jean Tinguely and Roman Signer to the concert antics of Les Reines Prochaines, Switzerland has long been a stronghold of performance.

In the context of PerformanceProcess, New Swiss Performance Now celebrates the contemporary legacy of these practices. The exhibition concentrates on a new generation of artists, including those who regularly engage in performance art as well as those who use the medium only occasionally. It defies the typical presentation of performance in an art institution, where live work is usually either an exceptional event, or is represented through leftover traces. New Swiss Performance Now privileges the live, with no documentation, scripts, props, or other substitutes. Across the duration of the exhibition, a program of more than fifty fleeting performances unfolds, all newly commissioned or recent. They range from the dazzling to the almost imperceptible, and draw on techniques from theater, dance, and installation.

Often artists are attracted to the fact that an ephemeral act can challenge art conventions— for instance it can unsettle art’s easy collect- ability, subverting the permanence of painting and sculpture. Or they are interested in the way in which a live event, and the bodies that enact it, can trouble both audiences’ experiences and art institutions’ typical operational strategies. In their hands, a performance can be a spectacular action, presented at an announced time for an expectant audience; it can interrupt a conventional art viewing experience; it can be a largely unnoticeable negotiation between artist and institution that subtly shifts their protocols; it can be an event recognized as such by visitors only after; or it can be something that the visitor herself or himself enacts, perhaps even unwittingly. In short, while such artistic manifestations may have in common a time-based, evanescent, and dematerialized format, the range of what goes under the name »performance” is vast.

The performances featured in New Swiss Performance Now demonstrate this. They include several performances that are activated over the duration of the exhibition, whose impact comes from their persistence. This is the case with Marta Margnetti’s Dispositivo di protezione (protective device) (2018), which takes the form of a silver amulet gifted to each person employed at Kunsthalle Basel; they are to be worn during working hours and explained to whomever might ask about them. The piece’s »performativity” lies in the act of gifting and the agreement to wear and personally disperse information about the artwork. Differently approaching the issue of labor is Jérôme Leuba’s battlefield #132 (2018), from his series of »living sculptures.” Two hired performers take turns simulating a seemingly ordinary, perhaps entirely unnoticeable, action (a man turns a corner of the stairwell into an impromptu workspace) that becomes strange through its tenacity: they do so from Thursday to Sunday, over the entire workday.

The exhibition also includes projects whose conceptual nature affects nearly every other project. Florence Jung, for instance, requires that visitors attending certain performances in the main gallery sign an agreement making them performers in her Jung59 (2018). It is not by chance that the legal document resembles those that performers often have to sign when working with institutions; its demand also echoes the signing away of rights we all face when, for instance, downloading a new computer application. Here, not to sign Jung’s agreement is to be denied entry. In a second piece, presented on Basel Museums Night, Jung presents Jung58 (2018), in which a guard stationed outside the main gallery asks to inspect people’s bags, subjecting visitors to the sorts of checks more usually encountered at airports or courthouses than at art exhibitions. Here again, to refuse Jung’s »security” measure is to be denied entry. Hannah Weinberger’s facilities and utilities (2018), on the other hand requires Kunsthalle Basel to make certain items, from curtained clothes racks to snacks to a fog machine, available to any performer in the exhibition. Weinberger’s artwork resides not in the objects themselves (which may or may not be selected and used) but in the intervention that re-directs an institution’s attention to servicing the needs of performers, rather than the other way around.

Some projects are the work of artists more typically known for their object production. These include Claudia Comte’s Hot Saw–Electric Power (2018), a continuation of the artist’s research into various forms of play, inspired by board games, dance, and professional sports. Here, an artist perhaps best known for her paintings and sculptures orchestrates a game carried out by lumberjacks who transform loads of timber into temporary geometries. Raphael Hefti’s We are not one way trip to mars people (2018) continues the artist’s experiments with using industrial materials and technologies against themselves. Mixing choreographic principles and chance techniques, his performance plays with the visual codes of both the history of Abstract Expressionism and public road marking; the result is a transient action creating a striking temporary indoor floor painting. Mai-Thu Perret’s Figures (2014) extends the feminist strategies at the heart of her practice. Here, with a minimalist staging, haunting vocals, specially composed music, and a life- size marionette animated by a dancer, her all-female cast enacts an elaborate narrative about female figures across history: an Indian mystic, a nineteenth-century US-American Shaker, a 1950s computer programmer, an artificial intelligence, and a journalist. Differently mixing the real and its representation is Yves Scherer’s Nail Care (2018), in which Scherer commissioned a curator to select a series of contemporary artworks, then had representations of the works painted onto the acrylic fingernails of a performer, who walks through Kunsthalle Basel on specific days with her portable »exhibition.”

Other performances take the form of one-on-one encounters. These include Florian Graf / FG Artists Service Group’s Healer (2018), for which Kunsthalle Basel hired the artist’s »company” to perform one of its advertised skills. The service consists of listening to and healing visitors over a series of individual appointments. In a second piece, which might well go entirely unnoticed, Graf acts out another role, that of Vagabond (2018), in which on February 9, 2018, he aimlessly lingers within a two hundred- meter radius of the institution. Graf’s performances play ironically with common perceptions about the role of the artist—running the gamut from dreamer to spiritual guide—articulating these in the form of hirable services. A different one-on-one approach is offered by Romy Rüegger, whose synthetic stream plays (2018) is conceived as a rendezvous between the artist and any visitor who has made an appointment with her. For it, Rüegger creates an experience inspired by film montage, built from fragmented texts, repetitions, and pauses, as well as feminist, postcolonial, and other narratives, shared while exploring symbolically loaded sites in the city.

A number of pieces loosely take the form of lecture-performances, involving associative storytelling or research. This is the case for Balz Isler’s untold but seen (2018), in which the artist weaves a complex poetic narrative across projected images and spoken text fragments, ordering knowledge, communication symbols, and imagery according to his own idiosyncratic logic. It applies as well to Stefan Karrer’s HORIZON_X (2018), an internet research-driven tale that uses maps, found images, and scientific findings to connect wave organisms, submarine cables, the Mediterranean Sea, and beyond. Steven Schoch’s TALKING AROUND (SUBJECT) WITH ACCENT #3 (2018) exuberantly explodes the lecture genre, deploying improvisation, philosophical rambling, pseudoscience, and duration to stretch rational thinking. Sophie Jung’s I wuz born this way...WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE? (A Miss Spell to Free Yourself from Patriarchal Undermining in the Work Place) (2016) takes the form of a fast-paced, loquacious tackling of contemporary sexism. Differently exploring feminism, Ramaya Tegegne’s Version #17: Annie Sprinkle and Version #18: Adrian Piper (both 2018) present the artist’s own take on the lecture genre in two pieces that first emerged from Tegegne’s attempt to teach herself the history of performance. She presents reenactments of historic feminist pieces of performance art, intertwining her versions with documentation of the originals.

A certain exhibitionism is the mainstay of performance, as is the voyeurism of the audience. In a second piece from his series of »living sculptures,” entitled battlefield #130 (2018), Jérôme Leuba engages more than twenty people to simultaneously gaze intently at any visitor who enters the exhibition. This reversal of the typical viewing experience provokes immediate unease. So, too, does Garrett Nelson’s Blind Audition (2018), which takes its title from the practice of a »blind audition,” a method of evaluating quality without prejudice by ensuring that those who judge are unable to identify the race, sexuality, age, et cetera, of the person auditioning. Here, the artist and his performer, Richie Shazam, locate the voice and movement of the piece behind curtain structures, thus refusing the spectacularized entertainment that some expect of performance art, while making identity politics central to it.

Some projects unfold in multiple parts. In Ariane Koch & Sarina Scheidegger’s EVERYBODY IS LEAVING, WE ARE SHOWING UP! (2018), spread over five consecutive Sundays, the artists and a group of hired performers (each of whom has the ability to impact the trajectory of the piece) treat themes of otherness and exclusion as they move swarm-like in the space. A different sort of buildup is present in Lea Rüegg & Raphaela Grolimund’s reich und schön und kunst, episode 1–3 (2018), a musical in three chapters loosely modeled on a soap opera, using pop cultural references to reflect on how young artists should act with respect to the art world, seduction, and success. Steven Schoch’s FEED #5 (2018) deploys props, costumes, meandering thoughts, and visitor participation to build, scene after scene, upon previous versions of his series of FEED works.

A number of performances play with the very idea of staging, including Sophie Jung’s Paramount VS Tantamount (2018), a character play comprised of improvised passages, music, and facial expressions through which the artist alternately portrays several characters. The concert stage, in this case two of them, is central to the riotous, simultaneous concerts of Oppressed by Privilege / Privileged by Oppression, whose Aufstand der Privilegierten (2018) channels a punk, political, DIY spirit and features lyrics derived from an open call to submit texts. Drawing equally from theater and party culture is Ernestyna Orlowska’s God Is a Girl, Extended Version: Night Time Is the Right Time (2018), made in collaboration with Tanja Turpeinen. Exploring the erotic and the absurd, rituals of freedom and the allure of mystical cults, the two performers enact a theatrical choreography of hedonistic excess.

Other pieces conceptually take the art space or art viewing experience as a point of departure. In Nils Amadeus Lange’s Despicable (2018), yellow-costumed characters inspired by the mischievous cartoon characters known as Minions install artworks from the collection of the Basler Kunstverein, perform a spectacle of art viewing, and then proceed to undress and dance to pop songs. Bridging high and low, the work embraces kitsch and sentimentality as dignified art experiences. In its own way, Mathias Ringgenberg’s musical performance Where Do You Wanna Go Today (Variations) (2018) by the fictional character PRICE juxtaposes the art institution with club culture, commenting on the frustration and solitude of a generation that has grown up with mass culture, neoliberalism, and the omnipresence of the internet. Lou Masduraud & Antoine Bellini turn the exhibition space into an installation for a collective experience with Active Substances (2018), an elaborate scenography in which so-called »active substances” are differently dispersed through the space, accompanied by live music.

A different sort of collective experience, this one commissioned in relation to Basel’s own performative tradition, Fasnacht, is Johannes Willi’s Yypfyffe (2018), a project envisioned with the Basel Fasnacht clique »Die Unbaggene.” The artist presents a forest- like setting in which the theme and props he designed for the clique are inaugurated with specially built music instruments. This and other events taking place throughout the exhibition’s duration lead to its grand finale on February 18 and into the wee hours of February 19, when all of Basel turns off its lights at 4 am for the Morgestraich, the ritual beginning of carnival, thus connecting the exhibition to the broader city’s collective performance.