Movies: Performance art

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....

Welcome to the over-the-top, extravagant world of Leigh Bowery, a key figure in New Romanticism and London nightlife in the 1980s. With his bizarre outfits, a mix of kitsch and fetish, and his eccentric performances, he influenced artists, musicians ...

A collaboration between filmmaker Ayoka Chenzira and performance artist Thomas Pinnock, who performs his "immigrant folktales" using traditional lore of his native Jamaica to dramatize his migration to New York in the 60's....

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 young man in a tram is asking a bit too much from a stranger....

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...

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....

Genesis P-Orridge: We used to just improvise at night, making up stories to each other. And so at some point we began making videos but when that one was done we don’t remember. It was completely made up on the spot. We were doing something else and ...

Shot on 16mm celluloid across parts of New Zealand and Samoa, interdisciplinary artist Sam Hamilton’s ten-part experimental magnum opus makes thought-provoking connections between life on Earth and the cosmos, and, ultimately, art and science. Struct...

How far are you willing to go to enhance your body and your life? Testing a diverse cocktail of illegal performance enhancing drugs throughout his life - bodybuilder an entrepreneur Tony Hughes, also known as Dr. Tony Huge, aims to prove that steroid...

A group of people return to see the feast....

Performance art piece...

An investigation into the extraordinary life and work of B. Catling, an eye-popping insight into the late-flourishing career of a maverick artist, teacher and performer....

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

Turtle Dreams, produced for WGBH-TV, originally aired September 2, 1983. Shot by Ping Chong. Composed by Meredith Monk, performed by her and her Vocal Ensemble....

"Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity" says the bible. The word flows from the tongue naming the pleasure of earthly life and judging it as beautiful, but shallow and useless; vanity is a deadly sin. A female sin. The man painted the woman, put a...

This short documentary serves as a portrait of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, one of Canada's most important painters. We meet him at the Bisley Rifle Range in Surrey, England, where he's literally shooting the Indian Act in a performance piece called "A...

Marina Abramović Freeing the Body was performed at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, where Abramović began dancing frantically to the sounds of a bongo player. During the early part of the performance, she still has plenty of energy, and she r...

Daniel Cockburn’s exuberantly cerebral, filmically deconstructionist work defies easy categorization, and this program of new work is no exception, from a short that interrogates “things that mean other things before becoming a thing that means other...

In 2003, Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh became the first World Champion of Chessboxing. This brain-busting combination of alternating rounds of chess and boxing was in fact an art performance calling for more balance in a world of extremes, and the audien...