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Economies. Traces of Performance

Silke Otto-Knapp, Schattentheater (Chalk circles) [Theater of Shadows (Chalk circles)], 2017, watercolor on canvas, 69 x 236 1/4 x 1 in. (175 x 600 x 2.5 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Purchase with funds provided by the Acquisition and Collection Committee and Christine Meleo Bernstein and Armyan Bernstein, © Silke Otto-Knapp, Courtesy of the Estate of Silke Otto-Knapp and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo by Brian Forrest

Tracing Performance, Fictions of Display

This exhibition highlights works from the MOCA permanent collection that engage with the not always obvious relationship between objects, theater, and performance. Tracing Performance, Fictions of Display builds upon Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1961-62), a performative project that staged the commercial transaction of selling an artwork in a bodega-like environment, as well as other economies determined by gestures, transactions, and bodies in works by Colette (or her alter ego Justine), Rebecca Horn, Brian Jurgen, Mike Kelley, Terence Koh, Beverly Semmes, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Martine Syms, among others. Several works on view have never been exhibited at MOCA before, including the painting Monsieur On Sait Qui (1982), by influential Polish theater director and happening artist Tadeusz Kantor; the five-channel video installation Big Hunt (2002) by Catherine Sullivan, who was trained as an actor as well as visual artist, and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s photograph The Loneliness of the Immigrant (1979 - 2011). 

The exhibition will also present recent acquisitions, including Silke Otto-Knapp’s painting Shattentheater (Chalk circles) [Theater of Shadows (Chalk circles)] (2017), a five-panel work based on photographs of the Bauhaus Dessau theater facility designed by Walter Gropius in 1926.

Tracing Performance, Fictions of Display is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, with Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant.

Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with major funding provided by Tatiana Botton and Jordan S. Goodman + The Goodman Family Foundation. Generous funding is provided by Michael and Zelene Fowler, The Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation, Jonathan Segal, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, and Pamela West.