Sylvie Fleury: Instructions for Twilight The artist's 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.

Since 2005, Performa has presented ten editions of its three-week international Performa Biennial that have animated New York City every other year, providing a worldwide platform for performance of the 21st century.

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, serving as inspiration for a performance combining action, objects, and sound, with performers wearing costumes designed by Chris Peters. 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.