A Performa Commission
A site-specific performance, co-presented with Performa for the Performa 11 biennial

The internationally acclaimed artist Ming Wong (b. 1971, Singapore) creates installations, video pieces, and visual artworks that examine the nature of identity from cross-cultural perspectives, often through the lens of popular and art cinema.

In this ambitious new project, which promises to be an unforgettable theatrical experience, he has created a site-specific work for Museum of the Moving Image, responding to the building's dynamic, fluid, and starkly white architecture. Persona Performa is inspired by Ingmar Bergman's reflexive 1966 masterpiece Persona, which is about an exchange of identities between an actress and her nurse on the remote Fårö Island. Like Bergman's film, Ming Wong's piece is a powerful meditation on cinema and theater. Twenty-four performers, amateur actors from New York, each representing a frame of film, will wind their way through the Museum space; the Museum itself becomes a camera, pointing at a "Bergman landscape" through the glass walls of the cafe. After a series of live action performances in the public spaces of the Museum, the show moves into the main theater, which becomes a film studio, the setting for a series of sound and video experiments.

Persona Performa, developed during a residency by Ming Wong at Museum of the Moving Image, will be a revelatory evening, a reflection on nothing less than the history and the nature of the moving image, and the nature of performance itself, on screen and in life.

Curated by Defne Ayas for Performa.

Program information:

Persona Performa by Ming Wong

Related Articles:
Double Vision by Michael Connor posted Nov. 08, 2011