NEW YORK.-Performa05 - First Biennial of New Visual Art Performance in New York will take place November 3 through November 21, 2005. More than 20 venues throughout New York will present a multidisciplinary program of live performances, film screenings, lectures, and exhibitions from November 3 through 21, 2005. Ten major new works will be premiered and more than 90 artists will participate in the three-week contemporary art program. PERFORMA05 is organized under the curatorial direction of Founding Director and Curator RoseLee Goldberg.

Program Highlights: PERFORMA’s first commission True Love is Yet to Come, a new work by Danish artist Jesper Just, will open PERFORMA05 at the Stephan Weiss Studio on November 3rd. Working with the Danish multi-media theater company VISION3 and the cutting edge Eyeliner 3-D projection system, Just will bring to life his seductively elegant style and complex take on male identity to life through a layering of a live performance by Denmark's Baard Owe interacting with projected images of the Finnish Screaming Men’s Choir and animated sets.

Belgian artist Francis Alÿs will present Rehearsal II on November 17, a PERFORMA commission and Alÿs’s first indoor performance, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega with a trio of performers – a strip-tease artist, pianist and singer – who will rehearse, over and over, the same performance at the Slipper Room on the Lower Eastside. Eyebeam and PERFORMA co-present Screen Play, a moving image visual score for live musicians, by artist and composer Christian Marclay. Marclay’s video collage combines computer animation, motion graphics and found footage, and will be interpreted live by three different ensembles of live musicians, including Elliott Sharp, TOT Trio, and Zeena Parkins, among others.

Salon 94 will preview a work-in-progress by Laurie Simmons, entitled, The Music of Regret, a mini-musical film in three acts examining the challenges of modern living in three tales of disappointment and regret. Incorporating narrative cinema, musical theater, puppetry, and dance, the film features key players from Simmons’s oeuvre, including her signature walking objects, ventriloquist dummies, and vintage puppets. Acts I and II of the film will be shown alongside a special live performance. The Music of Regret is co-produced by Salon 94 and PERFORMA, and is Laurie Simmons’s directorial debut.

LISTEN UP! Lectures as Performance at The Kitchen, will be an evening highlighting the current interest of artists in using the formal lecture setting as a context for visual art. Astrophysics with High Energy Light is Bernar Venet’s reconstruction of an early conceptual work, Neutron emission from muon capture in Ca40, which was first presented at The Judson Church Theater in 1968. A Room of One’s Own, a new work by Coco Fusco, will be a window onto special training sessions for women to learn interrogation techniques.

NOT FOR SALE: Writing on Performance and New Media on November 12 is a symposium presented in association with New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, Department of Art. A dynamic continuation of the discussion initiated by PERFORMA in 2004, NOT FOR SALE examines performance and its relationship to the museum, gallery, and collector. The two-part symposium will bring together a distinguished panel of critics and curators including Catherine Wood, curator of Tate Modern; Katy Siegel, art historian, curator and critic; and Phillippe Vergne, Co-Curator of Whitney Biennial 2006, who will discuss the art of writing about multidisciplinary work as well as individual approaches to archiving ephemeral art.

PERFORMA Radio, organized by Anthony Huberman, curator of SculptureCenter, will expand the field of performance into radio space with projects by invited artists including Ceal Floyer, Pierre Huyghe, and Banks Violette, which will be broadcast on WFMU (91.1FM-NY, and WKCR (89.9FM-NY). PERFORMA and Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art will co-present 24-Hour Incidental, which will simultaneous feature performances by ten artists, including John Armleder, Peter Coffin, Jason Dodge, Annika Eriksson, Karl Holmqvist, and Koo Jeong-A from noon one day to the next alongside the installation of Yes Painting, 1966 by Yoko Ono.

Anthology Film Archives and PERFORMA will present an evening of commissioned performances by three New York artists, Ei Arakawa, Jutta Koether and Emily Sundblad, and will present film retrospectives of Bas Jan Ader and Michael Smith, as well as the premiere of Rene Daalder’s documentary on the art and life of Bas Jan Ader, Here Is Always Somewhere Else.

Paula Cooper Gallery and PERFORMA co-present Carey Young’s Consideration, a series of process-based contracts developed by artist in consultation with a lawyer. WPS1 Art Radio, as the official Internet radio station of PERFORMA05, will present a lineup of live broadcasts, interviews, and documentation from the biennial including the launch of a book project Cosmograms by Melik Ohanian, and Pablo Helguera's first peratic live performance Foreign Legion-presented by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Gigantic Art Space for PERFORMA05.

Artists Space joins forces with PERFORMA to present Empty Space with Exciting Events. Artists Space curator, Christian Rattemeyer, has invited guest curators and artists to present individual evenings of performance that will form an extensive series in gallery’s main space. Artists include Vlatka Horvat, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Cat Mazza, and Lee Walton. Each Wednesday night will feature bands, with performances including Discoteca Flaming Star, Larry Krone, and Millree Hughes.

PARTICIPANT INC will stage a performance-based installation as the site of durational actions and several evenings of live video and performance including Derrick Adams, Ron Athey & Juliana Snapper, Charles Atlas with Chris Peck, Vaginal Davis, Lovett/Codagnone, My Barbarian, Luther Price and Katherine Finneran, Rafael Sánchez, and Julie Tolentino.

Over 20 venues and organizations will present additional programming as part of PERFORMA05, including: Anthology Film Archives, apexart, Art In General, Art Production Fund, Artists Space, Eyebeam, The Kitchen, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Museum for African Art, New York University, Participant Inc., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art and White Box. Participating galleries include, Deitch Projects, Paula Cooper Gallery, Jack The Pelican Presents, Leo Koenig Inc., Salon 94, and Yvon Lambert.