10 Iconic Performance Artworks of the 21st Century

What are the most iconic performance artworks of the 21st century so far? Perhaps no category has changed more since 2000. Performance has moved from the margins of the museum to its centre, absorbed opera, choreography, protest, and institutional critique along the way, and become the medium through which the art world stages its most public arguments with itself. The works on this list are wildly different in temperament: some last a minute, others nine years; some are carefully choreographed, others were shut down by security guards within seconds. Some hate performance art and would even renounce it as no art at all, but what’s out of question, is that each performance turned live human presence into something impossible to look away from, and impossible to reduce to documentation afterwards. What follows are ten works in which the body, for better and considerably worse, became the argument.

1. Santiago Sierra — 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000)

Santiago Sierra’s (b. 1966, Spanish) 160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000) is the work most people cite when they want to explain why they find Sierra unbearable, which is perhaps precisely the point of his work. Staged at El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo in Salamanca in December 2000, the piece involved four women — sex workers with heroin addictions — who were hired to sit in a row while a continuous line was tattooed across their backs. Their fee was the street price of a single shot of heroin, roughly four times what they would ordinarily earn for a sexual act.

Sierra had been developing the format since the late 1990s, in Mexico and Havana, and would go on to hire undocumented street vendors to bleach their hair at Venice, and asylum seekers to sit inside cardboard boxes because German law forbade paying them. The standard defence — that the tattoo is not the scandal, the conditions that make it purchasable are — is both true and perhaps slightly too convenient. Two and a half decades on, 160 cm Line remains the century’s most efficient demonstration that a line can be drawn on almost anything if the price is right. The question the work refuses to answer is the one it hands to us: where do we draw the line that would make this impossible, and put ethics and decency before economic precarity — or even before art itself?

2. Pope.L — The Great White Way: 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2001–2009)

Pope.L (1955–2023, American) had been crawling through American cities since the late 1970s, but The Great White Way is the crawl that grew into an epic. Beginning in 2001, he set out to traverse the entire twenty-two-mile length of Broadway on his elbows and knees, wearing a Superman suit with a skateboard strapped to his back, completing the route in segments over nine years. The title puns on Broadway’s theatrical nickname while stating the racial premise outright, and the durational structure means the work outlived the moment of its own conception several times over.

A Black man lying on a New York sidewalk risks being read as one more piece of civic scenery, unremarkable enough to step around; the Superman suit makes that indifference impossible to sustain. Pope.L described his practice in terms of “have-not-ness,” and the crawls literalise the vertical hierarchy of the street with a directness that no sculpture could manage. What keeps the work from didacticism is its absurdity — the skateboard is useless, the suit is ridiculous, the artist is visibly exhausted — and the fact that Pope.L was funny about all of it. His influence widened considerably after 2000, in part because the art world finally caught up to a body of work it had spent two decades walking past.

3. Zhang Huan — My New York (2002)

Zhang Huan (b. 1965, Chinese) had already spent the 1990s testing what a body could be made to endure — sitting motionless in a Beijing public latrine covered in honey while flies settled on him, lying naked on a bed of ice surrounded by tethered dogs in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. My New York (2002), staged for the Whitney Biennial, is the work in which that endurance turned outward and became a statement about a city rather than a self. The performance began indoors, with Zhang carried into the museum courtyard on a palanquin beneath a white cloth. When the cloth came away, he was revealed wearing a suit of raw meat sculpted into grotesquely oversized muscles — a bodybuilder, a superhero, a side of beef.

The artist then walked barefoot through the streets around the Whitney, handing white doves to passers-by on Madison Avenue to release. Zhang had moved to New York in 1998 and made the piece out of a genuine crisis of identity, unsure of who he was as a person or an artist in a city that seemed to him more nakedly animal than anything he had left behind. The meat suit reads as the most obvious kind of metaphor until you register the doves, at which point the work refuses to be read unambiguously: it is simultaneously an image of aggression and an act of release, of strength worn as costume and of tenderness handed to strangers. Zhang stopped making performances after returning to China in 2006, which lends My New York the retrospective weight of a farewell to the medium that made him.

4. Allora & Calzadilla — Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on “Ode to Joy” for a Prepared Piano (2008)

Jennifer Allora (b. 1974, American) and Guillermo Calzadilla’s (b. 1971, Cuban) Stop, Repair, Prepare (2008) begins with an act of considered vandalism: a hole cut through the centre of an early twentieth-century Bechstein grand. Blashpehmy! However, this intervention allows the pianist to stands inside the instrument, leaning backwards over the keyboard, and playing the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth — the “Ode to Joy” — upside down and mirrored, while pushing the wheeled instrument slowly around the room. Two octaves have been destroyed by the incision, so the melody arrives structurally incomplete, missing notes it cannot recover.

Beethoven’s setting of Schiller has served as the anthem of the European Union, was appropriated by the Third Reich, and has been sung at more or less every occasion of state congratulation in modern history — a melody so thoroughly claimed by opposing ideologies that its meaning has been sanded off. Allora & Calzadilla do not editorialise; they simply make the performer physically inhabit the instrument, absorb its weight, and produce the anthem from a position of contortion. The result is unexpectedly moving rather than merely clever, which is arguably the harder outcome. MoMA acquired the piece and staged it in the atrium in 2010, where the sight of a pianist wheeling a surgically wounded Bechstein through a crowd proved considerably stranger than any description of it.

5. Teresa Margolles — Limpieza (Cleaning), from What Else Could We Talk About? (2009)

For the Mexican Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, Teresa Margolles (b. 1963, Mexican) chose to do almost nothing visible. Each day of the Biennale, the floors of the Palazzo Rota Ivancich were mopped by relatives of people killed in Mexico’s drug war, using water mixed with blood and residue collected from the sites where those killings took place. Visitors walked across the damp floor, largely unaware of what they were walking on. The pavilion’s title, posed as a question, answers itself: at that moment there was nothing else to talk about.

Margolles was trained in forensic medicine before working as an artist, and her practice has consistently used the physical remainder of violence as material — morgue water, recovered glass, detoriated fabric. The gesture is closer to ritual than to spectacle, and its power depends entirely on withheld information. A room that has just been cleaned is the most ordinary thing imaginable; it becomes something else once you know. The cleaners were not trained performers but mourners, and the daily repetition of the act over six months turned the pavilion into something between a crime scene and a wake.

6. Marina Abramović — The Artist Is Present (2010)

It would be difficult to construct this list without Marina Abramović (b. 1946, Serbian), and The Artist Is Present (2010) is the work that made performance art a subject of general public conversation rather than a specialist concern. Staged in the atrium of MoMA alongside her retrospective, the piece was radically simple: for 736 hours and 30 minutes across nearly three months, Abramović sat immobile in a chair while visitors took turns sitting opposite her for as long as they wished. There was no script, no movement, and — after the first weeks — not even a table between them. The queues formed before opening; people slept on the pavement to secure a place.

The obvious criticism is that the work became a celebrity phenomenon, and it did: Lady Gaga, Björk, and James Franco all sat, the documentary followed, and the image of Abramović weeping when Ulay appeared unannounced in the chair circulated to a degree no gallery could engineer. But the criticism is also slightly beside the point. Abramović’s earlier work tested how much violence a body could withstand; this one tested how much attention a body could give. Roughly 750,000 people came to watch someone do nothing, and a substantial number of those who sat were reduced to tears by an encounter with sustained eye contact — which says less about Abramović’s mystique than about how rare undivided attention had already become by 2010. In my humble opinion, it is not her strongest work, but it is unquestionably her most consequential.

7. Pussy Riot — Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Drive Putin Away (2012)

On 21 February 2012, several members of Pussy Riot entered Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in bright dresses and coloured balaclavas, climbed onto the soleas before the altar, and performed roughly forty seconds of a song asking the Virgin Mary to become a feminist and to rid Russia of Vladimir Putin. Church security removed them almost immediately. The action was filmed, edited, and posted online, where it did what forty seconds in an almost empty cathedral could never have done in the room itself.

The performance was one of a series staged in the weeks before the March presidential election, targeting the Orthodox Church’s public alignment with Putin — Patriarch Kirill had described his leadership as a miracle from God. The state’s response converted a brief act of provocation into one of the century’s defining political trials. Three performers were held without bail, and convicted of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred; two of them served twenty-one months in penal colonies — a penitary sentence that proves their lyrics are rooted in truth, rather than hooliganism. Instead of continuing our discussion of the artwork in question, I have no doubt that the lyrics themselves (traslated to English by Masha Gessen) are incomparably more interesting.

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out,
Chase Putin out, chase Putin out.

Black robe, golden epaulets
All the parishioners are crawling to bow
The phantom of liberty is up in heaven
Gay pride sent to Siberia in a chain gang

Head of the KGB, their chief saint,
Leads protesters to jail under guard
So as not to offend the deity,
Women must give birth and love

Shit, shit, holy shit!
Shit, shit, holy shit!

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist
Become a feminist, become a feminist
The Church sings the praises of rotten dictators
Black limousines form the procession of the Cross
A missionary is coming to your school
Go to class and bring your money!

Patriarch Gundyayev believes in Putin
Bitch, better believe in God instead
The Virgin’s Girdle can’t replace the demos
The Virgin herself is with us in protest!

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, chase Putin out,
Chase Putin out, chase Putin out.

8. Anne Imhof — Faust (2017)

Anne Imhof’s (b. 1978, German) Faust (2017) took the German Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale and turned it into something between a bank lobby, a clinic, and a bunker. Curated by Susanne Pfeffer, the work introduced a raised glass floor a metre above the original pavement, glass ledges and elevated walkways, steel, and a welded-wire fence outside behind which two Dobermans dogs patrolled. Performers moved above, below, and through the crowd across a duration of several hours, marching, singing, crawling beneath the transparent floor among restraints and pill bottles, holding visitors in unbroken eye contact.

It won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, and the jury president described it as an installation posing urgent questions about our time, which might be jury language for we have no idea what that was but we cannot stop thinking about it yet I felt the same way about the piece. The two-hour queues outside the pavilion, full of collectors and curators abandoning decorum to get in, formed an unintended second performance about status and access. Some found it modish, but that objection has aged less well than the work itself.

9. Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė — Sun & Sea (Marina) (2019)

Few works have made catastrophe as pleasant to sit through as Sun & Sea (Marina) (2019), the opera-performance by filmmaker Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (b. 1983), writer Vaiva Grainytė (b. 1985), and composer Lina Lapelytė (b. 1984), all Lithuanian. Presented in a former quayside building in Venice’s Marina Militare, the Lithuanian Pavilion was filled with sand, artificial sunlight, towels, inflatables, and around two dozen performers doing what people do on a beach: dozing, applying sunscreen, playing, scrolling. Visitors watched from a mezzanine above, looking down on the scene as if from a drone or a gull.

The performers sing. In solo arias and layered choruses, they describe a volcanic eruption disrupting a flight, a coral reef bleaching, a dog with an unusual diet, a swimming pool at a resort — the entire register of minor holiday grievance, through which the ecological catastrophe is allowed to surface almost incidentally. Barzdžiukaitė’s aerial vantage is the crucial device, flattening humanity into a horizontal tableau and stripping the audience of the anthropocentric position they usually enjoy. It won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, drew queues of several hours, and has toured continuously since. That it manages to be genuinely funny, formally rigorous, and devastating at once is the reason it appears here rather than any of the many more strident works on the same subject.

10. Florentina Holzinger — SEAWORLD VENICE (2026)

Including a work from the current year is a risk, but Florentina Holzinger’s (b. 1986, Austrian) SEAWORLD VENICE(2026) is the performance everyone has been arguing about since May, and lists that wait for consensus tend to arrive after the conversation has moved on. Commissioned for the Austrian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale and curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, the work is conceived as an underwater theme park, a sewage treatment plant, and a sacred building simultaneously. Its most discussed element is a water tank in the courtyard, flanked by two portable toilets, filled with the filtered urine of visitors, in which a performer wearing a scuba mask remains submerged for hours at a time. Inside, nude performers hold contorted positions on an enormous weathervane. Holzinger hung upside down from a crane outside the pavilion, her body the clapper of a suspended bell — the first of a series of site-specific Études staged across Venice and its lagoon.

Many dismissed it as cheap spectacle, nudity and shock for their own sake, then queued anyway. Read against the lineage of Viennese Actionism, the shock is almost courtly. Holzinger’s all-female casts have long pursued a queer feminist project in which the naked female body is made so relentlessly present that it stops functioning as an object of mystification — to file the work under provocation is to miss what it has spent a decade dismantling. In a city sinking into the water it is famous for, a closed-loop system powered by the audience’s own waste is not subtle. It is not trying to be — and I don’t care. I care about the bell ringing in my stomach. I care about the diver in the tank pressing down on my chest. The circling jetski puts adrenaline in my blood; the tower tips my head back and takes me by the throat. The noise of the self-proclaimed critical audience goes quiet, and I am left with a sensation only performance art of this order can produce.

Last Updated on August 14, 2026