Sylvie Fleury: Instructions for Twilight Commission for the Performa Biennial 2025, New York

Sylvie Fleury presents a new interdisciplinary installation, interweaving performance, sculpture, sound, and music in a live exhibition. For nearly four decades, Fleury has mimicked, appropriated, and parodied the aesthetic language of art history and consumer culture, tracing the construction of gendered aesthetics in an increasingly mediatized society, also critiquing the art historical canon through a feminist lens.

For her Performa Commission, Fleury takes the history of action-based performance, including Fluxus and Happenings, as a point of departure to reimagine a series of scores with her own inimitable twist on gender roles, combining action, objects, and sound—with a live improvised composition by JG Thirwell and performers styled by Dauan Jacari.

The performance will also reimagine her own early performance and video works, such as Car Wash, 1995, where she dresses up in evening wear to hand wash her car; Walking On Carl Andre, 1997, where women strut across a Carl Andre floor sculpture like a catwalk in cherry-red stilettos; and Here Comes Santa, 2003, in which she smashes shiny, round Christmas decorations in high heels.