Installation & Performance Art
audience" could consist of onlookers on the street or patrons browsing the halls of a museum, among countless other possibilities.
Installation & Performance Art Encyclopedia Articles
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James Turrell
James Turrell is an American artist known for work that explored the relationship of light and space. As a child, Turrell developed an interest in cosmological phenomena, owing, in part, to flights he...
Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist who produced a multifaceted array of creative work, including sculptural installations, architectural projects, photographs, and videos. While Ai’s art was lauded...
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a Thai film director, writer, and installation artist whose preference for unconventional storytelling usually relegated his work to the art house. Nevertheless, his style...
Pablo Bronstein
Pablo Bronstein is an Argentine-born artist whose works often reflect his interest in architecture. Bronstein was four years old when his family moved from Buenos Aires to London. He drew compulsively,...
Huang Yong Ping
Huang Yong Ping was a Chinese-born French avant-garde artist, best known for his massive installations that explore East-West perspectives. Huang began his studies in 1977 at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine...
Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American sculptor and writer associated with the Land Art movement. His large-scale sculptures, called Earthworks, engaged directly with nature and were created by moving and constructing...
Dan Graham
Dan Graham was an American artist whose work addressed such notions as the dual role of the viewer (or audience) as both perceiver and perceived. To that end, he employed performance art, mirrors, video...
Eduardo Kac
Eduardo Kac is a Brazilian American artist who is best known for his works featuring genetically altered organisms in ways that frequently had conceptual or symbolic import. He termed these endeavours...
Lee Ufan
Lee Ufan is a Korean artist, critic, philosopher, and poet who was a prominent theorist and proponent of the Tokyo-based movement of young artists from the late 1960s through the early ’70s known as Mono-ha...
Banksy
Banksy is an anonymous British graffiti artist known for his acerbic and antiauthoritarian art, often done in public places. Although he is particularly known for his stenciled art featuring policemen...
Ann Hamilton
Ann Hamilton is an American installation artist who created performance art, physical objects, video and audio works, photographic prints, public art projects, site-specific sense-intensive installations,...
Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who is a self-described “obsessional artist,” known for her extensive use of polka dots and for her infinity installations. She employed painting, sculpture, performance...
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin is a British artist noted for using a wide range of media—including drawing, video, and installation art, as well as sculpture and painting—and her own life as the subject of her art. Her works...
Zhang Huan
Zhang Huan is a Chinese artist known for both his early photographed performance art that often showcased his own naked body and for his later production of a great variety of large mass-produced objects....
Francis Alÿs
Francis Alÿs is a Belgian-born Mexico-based conceptual artist who uses a variety of new and more-traditional media to evoke an often poetic sense of dislocation on social and political issues. Alÿs was...
Marcel Broodthaers
Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian multimedia artist who began his career as a poet and then turned to visual arts and, with skepticism and irony, created films, drawings, installations, prints, and works...
Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson is a Danish artist whose sculptures and large-scale installation art employed elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience of the ordinary....
Tino Sehgal
Tino Sehgal is a British-born artist who created installations that were known as “constructed situations.” Sehgal was raised in France and Germany. He studied political economy in Berlin and pursued dance...
Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese pyrotechnical artist known for his dramatic installations and for using gunpowder as a medium. Cai’s father—a painter, historian, and bookstore owner—was somewhat ambivalent...
Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay is a Swiss American visual artist and composer whose multidisciplinary work encompasses performance, sculpture, and video. Much of his art imaginatively explores the physical and cultural...