Contemporary art is marked by its rupture with traditional conventions. In this context, performance stands out as a powerful language, placing the body at the forefront—not only as an expressive medium but also as a tool of resistance and political critique.
Through ephemeral gestures and radical actions, performance artists challenge power structures, expose social violence, and provoke audiences to rethink the politics of the body. The artist’s physical presence becomes a living discourse, turning art into a space for confrontation and transformation.
Performance as Political Language
Since the 1960s, performance art has established itself as a practice that transcends the boundaries of institutional art. Artists such as Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, and Ana Mendieta used their own bodies as territories of resistance, exploring pain, silence, nudity, and repetition as forms of social critique.
In The Artist is Present (2010), Marina Abramović performed a silent action for over 700 hours at MoMA. Her still body, seated before the public, created an almost spiritual tension, challenging spectators’ passivity and questioning the boundaries between artist, artwork, and society. The body is not symbolic—it is the battleground itself.
Cuban artist Ana Mendieta fused body and nature in performances that denounced violence, colonization, and identity erasure. In her Silueta series, Mendieta imprinted her shape into the earth or mud, disappearing and reappearing as a form of protest. According to scholar Amelia Jones, in Body Art: Performing the Subject, these practices show how “the body becomes a site where social and political conflicts are staged” (Jones, 1998).
Body, Identity, and Resistance in Contemporary Art
In contemporary art, the performative body plays a central role in debates about gender, race, sexuality, and territoriality. Performance makes visible historically marginalized bodies and claims spaces of existence, memory, and expression.
Brazilian artist Ventura Profana, for instance, integrates performance, faith, eroticism, and politics to address the erasure of Black and trans bodies in Brazilian culture. Meanwhile, the Indigenous collective MAHKU (Huni Kuin Artists Movement) conducts performance interventions combining singing, body painting, and territorial resistance.
These practices are not isolated. Prestigious institutions such as the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) and Tate Modern have dedicated space to performance as a critical language, curating exhibitions that highlight the body as a political agent.
Furthermore, the rise of social media and digital platforms has amplified the circulation of these actions. Performances recorded on video or streamed live reach previously inaccessible audiences, reinforcing the political potential of ephemeral art.
Art as Insurgency
Performance in contemporary art does not merely seek to represent—it intervenes, incites, and disturbs. The body in action is also the body at risk: exposed to vulnerability, judgment, and repression. Yet this is where its power lies—in rejecting objectification and affirming presence as resistance.As Claire Bishop asserts in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, performance art demands a new kind of viewer—one who is willing to “enter zones of instability” (Bishop, 2012).
In this instability, the artist’s body and the public gaze meet—and from that encounter, political transformation may arise.
