Performa Director and Founder RoseLee Goldberg has announced the recipients of the 2009 Performa Commissions, a program that will award a total of $350,000 to help nine artists realize projects for the institution’s biennial, Performa 09. Individual grants range from $30,000 to $100,000, as supported by patron Toby Lewis’s TOBY Fund, along with a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation; Performa also received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in support of its 2009 programming.
Guy Ben-Ner will present a live-action film that documents a conversation he carries on with himself while flying back and forth between Berlin and Tel Aviv. Omer Fast‘s project will reveal the slipperiness of memory as actors repeat one another’s performance of a veteran’s recollection of the Iraq war. Yang Fudong will create an open film set inside of a New York City museum, while Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster will produce a musical at a secret location in Lower Manhattan. Yeondoo Jung will enact his first live performance with a live Korean magician. Mike Kelley will present three vignettes inspired by his 2005 film and installation Day is Done; Art Lindsay will conduct an arts parade with over 100 performers. Wangechi Mutu will collaborate with vocalist Imani Uzuri on a multi-faceted performance and installation, while Christian Tomaszewski will produce a fashion show based on the former Soviet Bloc’s imaginings of the future.
[Performa 09 takes place from November 1- 22, 2009. For previous A.i.A. online coverage of Performa, see Happy Anniversary: MoMA, Performa Celebrate the Futurist Manifesto, published on March 1, 2009.]
