"Live" Lives: Performance Art Biennale Returns

At the tail end of the arts festival season arrives the 2007 Live Performance Art Biennale, inhabiting galleries around town until October 28. It was inspired by a one-off festival here in 1979 called Live at the End of the Century, which united all the leading art galleries by inviting them to curate and produce performance art as a single group, thereby forging a new model of interdependency among them. The series was reborn in 2001, and now goes up every other year, and is open to local and international artists. The curatorial theme of the festival this year is "Public", and the artist guidelines require each piece to manifest as: "an action presented in public, and intervention into public, the participation of public, or a descriptive reference to public." The intent of Live is to examine issues of community and identity through this unique form of art, and in doing so to take it out of the back rooms and insider galleries and bring it into the public domain.

Photo removed at the request of the festival.