Performing For The Camera, exhibition review: Original and engaging

Even if it's not immediately hard-hitting, this show revisits key moments in performance art and explores the smartphone’s transformative effect on photography, says Ben Luke
Subversive: Romain Mader’s Ekaterina: Mariage à Loèche-les-Bains (Marriage in Leukerbad) 2012
Romain Mader/ECAL
Ben Luke18 February 2016

Performing for the camera is a ritual that defines our age — what invention is more 21st century than the selfie stick?

The smartphone’s transformative effect on photography is reflected in this original and engaging show. Amalia Ulman adopted a persona on Instagram, documenting her character’s cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles, for instance, and Romain Mader created a fiction of himself as a tourist seeking a Ukrainian bride. Both works mimic the snapshot language we all use, but are acts of performance used to subvert real cultural phenomena.

Collisions between performance and photography are manifold, stretching across the history of the medium, from the Nadar Studio in 19th-century Paris to feminist performance artists who made works specifically for the camera, such as Carolee Schneemann.

The show revisits key moments in performance art, such as Yves Klein’s painted women works, ephemeral events which are only significant today because the camera caught them. The duo Harry Shunk and János Kender, who collaborated with Klein and numerous other artists, and Babette Mangolte, who brilliantly captured Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer’s choreography, emerge as real heroes, perfectly balancing documentary and art in their images.

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1/16

It’s not an immediately hard-hitting show, but it succeeds in enriching our understanding of both the disciplines it reflects.

Until June 12, Tate Modern (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk)

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