• Conjuring Otherwise (2026)
10th Venice International Performance Art Week 2026: Conjuring Otherwise
European Cultural Centre – Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy
December 10-13, 2026
Opening: Thursday, December 10, 2026, 16:00
Admission is free, but places are limited.
A simple act that persists over time can become a transformative force.
For its tenth edition, the Venice International Performance Art Week returns to Palazzo Mora under the title Conjuring Otherwise, bringing together live durational performances, performance-based films and immersive works to examine how artistic practices can unsettle dominant experiences of time. The programme approaches queer time, crip time and Indigenous temporalities as ways of thinking beyond linear, normative and productivity-driven understandings of duration. Across the works, time appears as something lived unevenly: through bodies, histories, memories, displacement, endurance and survival.
The idea of the ‘otherwise’ draws upon thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Elizabeth Povinelli and Avery Gordon, whose work considers forms of life, knowledge and presence that dominant political and cultural structures have marginalised, silenced or rendered invisible. In Gordon’s writing on the spectral, what has been socially suppressed does not disappear completely but continues to make demands upon the present through hauntings. From this perspective, ‘conjuring’ becomes a practice of attention toward what persists beneath established narratives.
Performance art offers a particularly powerful field in which to engage these questions. In durational performance, an apparently simple action can transform through persistence. Repetition, exhaustion or stillness alter meaning while the body makes time tangible through duration.
Performance-based film provides for different encounters with time: recorded actions and spatially or temporally separate bodies may coexist within the same frame, allowing past, present and distant spaces to intersect. Film therefore becomes another means of troubling linear time and bringing apparently absent bodies or events into renewed proximity.
For the first time in the history of the Venice International Performance Art Week, the invited live artists have developed their works during a ten-day residency in Venice. This preparation period allows each work to respond directly to Palazzo Mora while also emerging from sustained collective encounters. The film works of the DigiLiveAiR Residency Commissions have been produced over extended online residencies in four curation sections that touch on social inclusion, gender equality, the climate crisis, and the promotion of justice and peace. Both the online and live residencies bring forth new and original works that emphasise process, coexistence, and shared attention: they show what becomes possible when artists remain together long enough for individual practices to affect one another
In this sense, Conjuring Otherwise asks how different worlds might already be rehearsed through ways of gathering, enduring, remembering, listening and acting. Across live performances, film and immersive experience, the tenth edition considers artistic practice as a space in which established temporalities may be suspended, and other relationships between bodies, histories and futures can briefly become perceptible.
A simple action sustained over time can become a transformative force. It can alter the person performing it. It can alter the witness, and it can open, albeit temporarily, the possibility of being otherwise.
Live durational reading: The New Gaza Monologues — ASHTAR For Theatre Productions And Training (ASHTAR Theatre), Palestine.
Live durational performances: Tiziano Cruz (AR), Konrad Suder Chatterjee (PL/PS), Dani D’Emilia (BR), Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu (TR), Nicola Fornoni (IT), Lauren Kelly (IE), Pacha Queer (EC), Amin Parvin (IR/FR), Chomp Puttha (TH), Liz Rosenfeld (US/DE), Caro Ruoff & Steef Kersbergen (NL), Sam Shackleton (UK), Leonardo Sinopoli (IT), Martin Toloku (GH/NL), Wojak (AU).
Works on exhibit:
Visiting Immune Places: A haunting virtual reality experience by VestAndPage with the Anam Cara Collective (Aldo Aliprandi, Marianna Andrigo, Giorgia de Santi, Andrea Pagnes, Enok Ripley, Sara Simeoni, Marcel Sparmann, Verena Stenke)
DigiLiveAiR Residency Commissions: Performance-based films produced in online residences presented by EntrAxis, ECC Performance Art, NURT, and Untitled Tbilisi: Agil Abdullayev (AZ/DE), AMP (CAP) Collective (UA), Menko Dijksterhuis (NL), Fenia Kotsopoulou & Shima Rastin (GR/IR), Tamara Maghlaperidze (GE), Zorka Marian (HU/NL), Gohar Martirosyan (AM/FR), Dualtagh McDonnell-Grundy (IE), Zoya Shojaee Sardashti (US/NL), Yaryna Shumska (UA), Direct Action Theatre (NO).
Performance Art Video Commission: Tiziano Cruz (AR). From the archive: Felipe Monteiro (BR).
Artistic Direction + Curation Live Residency: Andrea Pagnes & Verena Stenke
Curation Online Residency: Sabrina Bellenizier, Anja Foerschner, Ostap Manulyak, Giorgi Rodionov, Verena Stenke
PAV Commission Curation: Laurenz Arguello
Project Management: Gabriel Lyons, Laurenz Arguello
Technical Direction: Giovanni Dantomio, Aldo Aliprandi
External Mentor Live Residencies: Joseph Morgan Schofield
Artist Assistants: Steef Kersbergen, Ash McNaughton, Enok Ripley
Documentarists: Fenia Kotsopoulou, Lorenza Cini, Matilde Sambo
Realised in collaboration with the European Cultural Centre (ECC), We Exhibit, Live Arts Cultures, and EntrAxis, with partial support from Creative Europe.
SAHA (www.saha.org.tr) provided support for Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu.