The Eternal Opening

Performance art is considered an ephemeral medium; lost in a phenomenon that disappears as quickly as it is made. It adopts a linear concept of temporality – a beginning, middle and end – and, if not mediatised, cannot be relived. To obtain a permanent form, it relies on the audience; observing, reacting, and remembering.

Enter, Mike Parr. Through retrospection, Parr draws on the past in making sense of the present and vice versa. A restaging of his recent(2019), (2017) and (2016), alongside new durational performances, (2019), and (2019) comprising of five acts (instructions from his 1971/72, ‘150 Programmes and Investigations’ archive project); reopens channels of interrogation and awareness concerning social and geopolitical issues, and presents a new iteration of a career-spanning act of self-portraiture using his body as the principal medium. These ongoing conversations are at the core of this multilayered exhibition – ‘The Eternal Opening’, recently exhibited at Carriageworks in Sydney – which sees a gallery housed within a gallery, and the live reproduction of past work in which audience presence is central to its outcome.