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Since the advent of Post-modernism in the 1980’s, the visual arts have changed: in some
ways for the better and in other respects for the worst. With the new century, the Digital Era
brings us to the new world of total communication, where the problem of art-and-audience
connection is still questionable. Here we have 10 contemporary performance artists who
question issues of modern society and they come up not with kitchen debates but real acts.
 

Wafaa Bilal

Iraq born American artist Wafaa Bilal has become known for provocative interactive video
installations. For a performance called…and Counting, he had his back “carved” with 5,000
red ink dots. The idea was to represent American casualties in the Iraq war. Wafaa tattooed
100,000 dots for “unidentified and forgotten Iraqi victims,” only visible in ultraviolet light.
Besides the politics, many of Bilal’s projects over the past few years have addressed the
dichotomy of the virtual vs. the real. He tries to transform the normally passive experience
of viewing art into an active participation to change the relationship of the viewer to the
artwork. The good example is Domestic Tension, where Bilal lived in a gallery space for a
month while observers viewed him from a webcam and remotely fired a paintball gun at
him.
 

Laurel Nakadate

Breakthrough artist Laurel Nakadate is most often showed up in the “video artist” category.
Many people would say it’s crazy to dance and celebrate fake birthdays in homes of adult
strangers. That is exactly what Laurel did. She recorded episodes with different plots, some
of them apparently through sexual actions, but even 90% of them have been made without a
single touch. It could be just a performance art with the camera on, but the level of
disturbing and shock turns it into something else. As a matter of fact, the videos question
people’s judgements about who should be friends with who. Laurel also explored the field
of highly popular “life camera chats” with young girls. As for her latest effort, she
joins cross-over artist James Franco, to perform an Ouija board seance for Tennessee
Williams.
 
Jess Dobkin

Dobkin is an avant-garde artist from Toronto. Her explicit art is full of humor and her
provocative performances are about “awes and sparkles”. Jess uses the body as a medium
and takes plenty liberty with it. You can die laughing with the vagina clown car or fall in love
with the nipple cabaret. For example, have you ever seen how two boobs become puppets?
It may sound crazy, but such funny and strange performance talks on the complexities of
breasts relationship in a silent movie. Thus, she questions and exposes dark sides
of female body’s state in the modern society, but the goal of Dobkin’s performances can be
summed up as a desire to unclench people’s inhibitions.
 
Constant Dullaart

Dullaart is a Dutch artist living and working in Berlin. His work is concerned with “visualizing
internet vernaculars and software dialects.” Constant’s currently causing a stir with his
latest web-based project, in which Dullaart and two assistants are creating thousands of
fake Facebook profiles. In the project he used the names of Hessian soldiers-for-hire who
fought in the U.S. civil war and flouted Facebook’s policy on “fake” profiles. No doubt, the
intention is to stage mass “likes” of certain posts in protest against what Dullaart calls the
“quantification of social capital.” Nevertheless, even his official page is a surprising
performance itself.
 
Nate Hill

Next artist in the list is a performer from Brooklyn. Nate Hill’s art is never the same and
every new performance is more complicated than the previous one. He gives public access
to rogue taxidermy shows and helps to purge your house of your ex’s stuff as the Death
Bear. After all, he allows you to pummel energy with your fists as the Punch Me Panda.
Currently, he’s focusing on Internet-based performance that warps the notions of racism.
There he made a series of fake product sites and posted some on social media, which
represented discomforting Internet entities. All in all, the fact that Nate discourages public
through internet shows that contemporary performance conquers digital space and it works
in off-line just as sharp.
 
Man Bartlett

Following the previous artist, Man Barlett decided to serve a tether between our daily
Internet communication and “the real world.” He is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and
works in New York. At whole, his diverse practice includes sound, drawing, collage, video,
performance and digital projects that often use online platforms as outlets for playful yet
subversive social critique. In one of his performative action he has taken upon himself the
vast task of regurgitating reality into a series of 140 character. So, he has spent 24 hours at
the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, asking people where they’re going and
where they’ve been. As the result, he created a highly popular but initially unusual stream
live-tweeting strangers’ answers. “I wanted to push the simultaneous
engagement/participation between physical and virtual audiences to their limit, to see how
well they could coexist,” said Bartlett.
 
Mireille Astore

Beirut-expat Mireille Astore is an artist, poet, and art scholar. Her most famous work called
Tampa was dedicated to Afghan refugees and their attempts to seek asylum in Australia in
2001. “Tampa” is a performance of claustrophobia, endurance and an exploration of
distance and time as experienced by refugees. It was a preforming in a 10:1 scaled version
of their ship on the shores of Bondi in Sydney with Astroe inside. She
ritualistically photographed her observers and uploaded the shots onto the Internet, while
“waiting for her release.” She continues to “ask what it is to be human,” and expands the
online element of her practice. It’s a great opportunity which we have today to use internet
for greater accessibility by a bigger audience and Mireille knows it well.
 
Rachel Maclean

Glasgow-based Maclean’s surrealistic videos and paintings have been mounting in recent

years. The biggest coup for Maclean’s practice came in May, when she represented
Scotland in the 2017 Venice Biennale. For the Biennale, she expanded her growing oeuvre of
dreamy, dystopian films. In each narrative, Maclean herself plays a shape-shifting,
tragicomic protagonist whose experiences reflect the underbelly of internet culture and
consumerism. The darkly humorous scenarios she creates critique the commercialization
and homogenization of contemporary society at the hands of social media and its
neverending filter bubble of news and curated personas.
 
Hanne Lippard

This artist makes sound works and poetry performances using her own writing and
voice.Hanne Lippard‘s text-based works utilize daily speech and transform this
into compositions of words. These words are characterized by syntactical repetition and
lexical alienation. Thus, In her performances a voice becomes a mechanical instrument of
narration that transforms accumulated language materials consisting of quotes, slogans
and text messages into melodic abstractions. Talking about the content, In her work she
usually talks on themes of modern working life and our relationship with technology. So, her
vignettes, varying in length from around one minute to almost an hour, are thought-
provoking and hypnotic.
 
Marcos Lutyens

As a performer Marcos Lutyens has layered and complex work. What is unique about

Marcos, he embraced installation and, often, hypnosis. For example, one of his
performances called ‘In touch’ was a part of the Centre Georges Pompidou Hors de Pistes
series on May 2014. The performance was filmed and after all the movie showed how each
trance participant moves across the esplanade. Each person is accompanied by a
companion who holds a yellow umbrella above the trance subject. The performance
involves the psychological pull that magnetic suggestion has on participants. Finally, this
shift of consciousness may remind us that humans have the ability to sense space in terms
of cardinal directions rather than egocentric coordinates.