by Eve Rogers // Nov. 21, 2025
The ephemeral nature of performance art has long kept it on the periphery of the art world—a challenge that Performa has made central to its mission. Since its 2005 inception, the New York–based biennial has presented three weeks of performance works by visual artists from around the world. Working closely with artists over extended periods to develop original pieces that push the boundaries of what performance can do, the festival has become fertile ground for creators who might not otherwise work in live formats, offering them the space and support to experiment with time, audience and collaboration.
Among the standout acts in the 2025 program of commissioned works is Aria Dean, the Los Angeles–born artist and writer whose practice moves thoughtfully between theory, image, object and body. Now based in New York, she works across sculpture, installation, video and writing, often intertwining digital and physical materials to explore how art behaves and how our ideas about form, identity and power take shape. Her work frequently returns to questions of representation and the conditions of Blackness, drawing on influences ranging from the legacies of minimalism to Afropessimist thought.
At Performa 2025, Dean unveils ‘The Color Scheme,’ a new theatrical work co-commissioned by Hartwig Art Foundation and inspired by a brief 1923 meeting between two Black American expatriates in Berlin’s Tiergarten. Set in the fragile aftermath of the First World War, the piece follows two figures—The Philosopher and The Poet—as they navigate the intersections of Black modernist aesthetics and emerging political thought. Combining live film, real-time projections and a virtual reconstruction of the Tiergarten as it might have appeared in 1923, Dean probes the tensions between realism and representation, reflecting on how Black artistic practices negotiate history, perception and lived experience.
Aria Dean, portrait // Courtesy of the artist, photo by Molly Matalon
Eve Rogers: ‘The Color Scheme’ stages a conversation between two Black American expats amid a digitally reconstructed Tiergarten in the wake of World War I. What drew you to this place and this historical moment as a backdrop for the piece, and why do you think it resonates today?
Aria Dean: The play stages a conversation inspired by a real dialogue that took place in the Tiergarten in 1923 between two American intellectuals during their travels, so my choice for the setting and historical moment is intrinsic to the project. The location drives the conversation more than it forms a backdrop. The conversation is sparked by and loosely revolves around the imperially-funded monuments of the Siegesallee; the men respond to developments in aesthetics as they manifest in these statues and in their own personal careers. But most exciting to me was exploring strategies for approaching historical material, especially historical material with a political focus: the question of history, its mediation and representation. In particular, I am interested in strategies of distancing and defamiliarization, especially irony.
Set design from ‘The Color Scheme,’ 2025, digital animation stills // Courtesy of Aria Dean and Filip Kostic
ER: You collaborated with many people to produce this new work for Performa. Can you speak a little about the experience and process of working on such a collaborative effort?
AD: The crew was built from a network of friendships and existing collaborations. In fact, the play itself emerged out of an existing plan amongst the core crew (production designer Filip Kostic, composer Evan Zierk, DP Alex Huggins) to make a film adaptation of a particular French novel using virtual production techniques. We’ve all been interested in the relationship between live performance and cinema and new digital techniques and have wanted to pervert the processes and relations of these mediums for a while. This play came about as the perfect chance to test these ideas out in real time.
Most of my work requires collaboration, whether it’s with fabricators or with cast and crew. I prefer to work this way. A romantic idea of the artist working alone and taking all the credit for the work does not excite me. For me–and for the crew–there are stakes to working this way. Part of the artwork is this collaborative or collective organization of labor and thought underpinned by a view of “art [as] one productive process among other modes of production,” to borrow from Sergei Tretyakov. This art also “revises simultaneously [. . .] its own methods and devices every time it fulfills a new task.”
Aria Dean: ‘Luisen-Denkmal (Queen Louise of Prussia Statue, Tiergarten, Berlin),’ rendering, 2025 // Courtesy of the artist, Chateau Shatto and Greene Naftali
ER: How do you merge the material and the virtual in this commission? What significance does this “double replication” of the space and its monuments hold?
AD: Filip Kostic built a virtual Tiergarten set in Unreal Engine; it reconstructs the since-moved 32 sculptural groups of the Siegesallee, an avenue commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm II to assert an imperial narrative of German history through renderings of figures like Kant or Goethe (and which was destroyed in WWII). I 3D-scanned the surviving, relocated statues at the Zitadelle Spandau; as such the virtual environment already has the material world folded into it. And then there’s the set pieces and the actors, all of these heterogeneous elements are spliced onto the same plane through a film that is constructed in real time and projected behind the stage. ‘The Color Scheme’ play is not intended to express a divide between the virtual and the material, but to weave these registers together in an immanent structure and aesthetic.
Tiergarten, Berlin, Monument to Friedrich Wilhelm III, published by Novitas, Berlin S.W. 68, ca. 1908–1912, scanned postcard // Courtesy of the artist
ER: Theater and dramaturgy seem like a suitable marriage of your writing and visual arts practices. Can you speak a bit about how these different disciplines inform each other for you?
AD: I view the play as a dialogue before I view it as theater-as-such. It’s definitely related to the history of theater and the theatrical situation, but it operationalizes the theater as a film set. Everything that happens in the register of “theater” is for the sake of the register of “cinema” and producing seamless montage with a narrative thrust.
My writing and visual practice are always joined, but in this case–as is the case in other video and performance works I’ve made previously–the work is a container for my writing, and is motivated by it. The two characters offer deconstructed theoretical-political theses in a sense. The text is a mixture of my own writing, the writing of historical figures such as Alain Locke and Claude McKay, as well as European contemporaries of theirs, and thinkers who were not yet born when the play takes place. In the printed script, some of these are denoted as full quotations (we find a quote from Iris Murdoch, another from Dziga Vertov), and at other times they are paraphrased. It’s a cut-up or collage in some sections. But overall, theory, prose, screenwriting, dramaturgy and object-based practice are always working in tandem for me, whether in a live or film work or a sculpture show etc.
ER: What do you hope might unfold differently for audiences encountering your work as a theater piece in a festival setting like Performa?
AD: I hope people allow their attention to wander between the elements presented. I hope people will laugh at the dialogue, feel for the characters, disagree with them, wonder whether I think any of this is true, get distracted à la Benjamin’s cinematic subject, get bored and thus transcendent à la Paul Schrader, get obsessed with the formal elements à la…and so on. I hope nothing ever settles.
Festival Info
Performa Biennial
Aria Dean: ‘The Color Scheme’
Biennial: Nov. 1–23, 2025
Performances: Friday, Nov. 21; 7:30pm and Saturday, Nov. 22; 5pm
performa2025.org
Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St, New York, NY 10002, USA, click here for map
