Sat, Nov 1, 2 pm · 3 pm · 4 pmNE corner of E 7th Street & Avenue A (Tompkins Square Park)
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Performa has partnered with Extra Extra—an interdisciplinary platform exploring sensuality in urban spaces—to present a series of fourteen sensory walking tours throughout New York City. Drawing from Performa’s rich 20-year archive and Extra Extra’s investigative spirit, select international artists, curators, designers and thinkers will reimagine New York’s cultural landscape through themes of play, intimacy, and the city’s evolving future.
These walks invite participants to experience the city and its performance landmarks, from SoHo and Tribeca to Harlem, Brooklyn, and the East Village, through an intimate sensory lens of voice and place.
The program will coincide with Performa’s 20th anniversary, featuring city walks compiled and guided by Andrius Arutiunian, Defne Ayas with RoseLee Goldberg, Nadine Botha, Nina Folkersma, Gabriel Fontana, Emmanuel Iduma, Adam Kleinman, Gabriel Lester, Raimundas Malašauskas, Tavia Nyong'o, Willem de Rooij, and McKenzie Wark.
The guided tours are a harbinger of hope for an unexpected future of the metropole. They encourage you to rediscover the city’s shifting sensuality and engage deeply with its performative legacy, mapped through Performa’s archive.
Join us for this extraordinary journey where artists, designers and thinkers transform how we see, hear and feel the city, offering new perspectives of hope in one of the world’s most vibrant cities.
A guided walk tracing how queer and marginalized communities have reclaimed New York’s sports spaces, from surveillance and resistance at the West Side YMCA, to early Pride routes, to the Gay Games celebrations in Central Park. Framed through team play as a microcosm of society, the walk looks at how inclusion/exclusion, leadership/collaboration, and individual drive/collective care play out on courts, fields, and running paths, and how those lessons travel beyond the game.
In dialogue with the Performa Archive, the route nods to Paulo Bruscky’s Collective Football Game and Mike Kelley’s examinations of American sports culture, linking historical and speculative practices of play to contemporary artistic inquiry. The premise is simple and hopeful: if teams can be reorganized with joy and care, so can cities; turning play into a small rehearsal for new ways of being together.
Co-produced by Performa and Extra Extra. Curated by Defne Ayas, Senior Curator-at-Large, Performa, and Director, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Samira Benlaloua, Artistic Director, Extra Extra.
A Performa and Extra Extra Project . Produced by Performa and Extra Extra.
Supported by Creative Industries Fund, Consulate General of the Netherlands, Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Mondriaan Fund, the Municipality of Rotterdam, and the Netherland-America Foundation.
