by Alison Hugill // Sept. 4, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Performativity.
While the terms “performativity” and “performance” are not exactly synonymous, they point to similar modes of expression, by which the act of doing something is privileged over signs or signification. The term “performativity” was first introduced by theorist J. L. Austin in his 1955 book ‘How to Do Things with Words.’ In it, he talks about the performative as the use of a word that is also an action, like a judge declaring a verdict or two people saying “I do” to get married. The word literally performs the deed. Judith Butler famously took this argument up in her 1990 book ‘Gender Trouble,’ insisting that gender is performative, rather than a fixed biological essence. Through the repeated act of performing gender, its characteristics have become part of our social codes. While performance is a kind of choice, performativity describes the way an unconscious and sometimes unacknowledged social identity might form over time.
In philosophy, the so-called “performative turn”—popularized across the art world in the 90s, as well—seeks to describe human actions as performances rather than static structures: cultural behaviors are made up of what we do and are not merely a series of passive signs to be analyzed. As some scholars see it: “viewing the world as a performance implies a shift of emphasis away from referentiality, immutability and legibility to ephemerality, process and spectatorship.” This accounts for contemporary art’s sustained interest in gestures, rituals, assemblies and process-based works that speak to our social and political realities.
Ana Mendieta: ‘Bird Run,’ 1974 // Copyright The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC, licensed by Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, DACS 2026, courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery and Alison Jacques, London
For this topic, we look at how performativity can be read through several art practices, some more historical and others alive and ongoing. As an example of the former, William Kherbek reviews the comprehensive exhibition of Ana Mendieta’s work currently on view at the Tate Modern in London, considering the ways in which performance has functioned as a form of activism in attempts to reclaim Mendieta’s status in the art world, following her suspicious death (allegedly at the hands of her husband, Carl Andre) in the 1980s. Through the exhibition, Kherbek discusses the centrality of performance in Mendieta’s art and the haunting qualities of her famous ‘silueta’ series.
Contributor Olivia Noss will then consider the photography of Carrie Mae Weems, in the exhibition ‘The Heart of the Matter’ opening at C/O Berlin next week, and its relationship to performativity. Through her ‘Kitchen Table’ series, Weems staged and photographed a fictional drama in which she plays the lead. While the setting is always the same—a kitchen table and a single overhead light—cast members rotate, playing lovers, friends and daughters. Weems makes the kitchen, which has traditionally been gendered as a woman’s space, into a site of drama and intrigue through these performative depictions.
Carrie Mae Weems: ‘Untitled Woman and Daughter with Make Up,’ 1990 from the ‘Kitchen Table Series’ as part of ‘The Heart of the Matter’ at C/O Berlin // © Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy the artist and Gladstone, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin
In another contribution, Jesse Slater will review the exhibition ‘everybody,’ currently on view at Georg Kolbe Museum, and the ways in which it problematizes how the body is expected to perform normativity, whether in terms of gender and queerness (as in works by EVA & ADELE or Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz) or in relationship to wellness and chronic illness (as in the work of Lauryn Youden or Carolyn Lazard). The exhibition draws on a book of the same name by Olivia Laing, and hopes to “open space for negotiation, in which bodies are not merely depicted, but felt, challenged and celebrated.”
Eva & Adele, exhibition view of ‘everybody’ at Georg Kolbe Museum, 2026 // Photo by Jens Ziehe
Later, Jeffrey Grunthaner will interview Colombian-American artist and poet Ana Maria Caballero, who will open her first mid-career retrospective next week at Francisco Carolinum Linz and recently published her poetry collection, entitled ‘Material.’ According to Grunthaner, her practice extends the page-oriented disposition of contemporary poetry into spaces and media that are more collaborative, performative, technologically-attuned and pictorially generative. Grunthaner looks at how Caballero’s poems prefigure the work she exhibits in galleries and museums. In this conversation, the pair discuss how Caballero’s poems are often insistent on objects, events and autobiographical details as clues to some perduring sense of identity. Referring back to the philosophical meaning of “performativity,” Grunthaner asks: what happens when something articulated virtually by a poem becomes embodied as gesture, image, event or encounter?
Ana María Caballero: ‘Being Borges,’ 2026 // Photo by Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk
Through these contributions and more, we will consider the performative nature of socio-political norms that we take for granted, and how modes of performance in contemporary art can help to reveal them.
