MEETING POINT #24

Performance art at the intersections with identity

After precising concepts of performance art, intersectionality, and identity, Brenda Bikoko will look at four different “cases” where these concepts are at work: the works of Adrian Piper; “Arctic Hysteria” by Pia Arke; performances about violence on women in Latin America; and finally Black Performance in Contemporary Art.

Brenda Bikoko is a PhD student at the VUB. She investigates the re-appropriation of the colonial photographic archive in contemporary art with an intersectional approach. The artists she focuses on are women who are connected to Europe in one way or another. She is involved in ‘Troubled Archives’, a collective of artists and researchers who critically engages with – colonial – archiving practises, including in relation to contemporary surveillance techniques such as facial recognition software. For them, it is important to find a place of dignity from which to confront the violence and indifference towards photographs in colonial archives. In the framework of “Performing Identity. Performance Art Facing Contemporary Societal Challenges”, an Erasmus+ partnership cooperation project supported by the European Union.