13 Rooms
With record-breaking crowds that snailed around Sydney’s Pier 2/3, a pop up bar, ‘Parlour’ night events (curated by local collective SuperKaleidoscope), an education hub, special access events for disabled and disadvantaged visitors, and ‘super curators’ at the helm, 13 Rooms indicated that the state of performance art has clearly changed from being a ‘transgressive fringe act to part of a greater event culture’.1
Adopting the festival format, this project was first commissioned by Manchester International Festival (UK) in 2011 as ‘11 Rooms’, it reemerged the following year as ‘12 Rooms’ for Museum Folkwang, Essen (Germany), an now as ‘Kaldor Public Art Project #27: 13 Rooms’—the addition of a room with each venue inserting local performance based practice into this international dialogue.
Presented as a series of rooms, visitors proactively placed themselves into the situation by opening a door and stepping across the threshold. This imposed action carried a sense of curatorial authorship which was laid over, and extended the instructional nature of these performed works, from artist to curator to viewer. Simply, these scripted performances flipped to inter-subjective situations, and the role of protagonists became blurred.
While this ongoing project has raised the obvious question of shifting definitions and commerciality of performance art in our times, it has also addressed the long-held consequence of this art form’s ephemerality. How does a curator extend the shelf life of ‘the performance’ without turning it into a road show? It is a fine line to negotiate, and while the structure of this project physically created a surprisingly intimate, individual experience, given the crowds, it also got rolled up within the spectacular nature of the event, sitting in conflict with the