Reading the Field – May 2025
In a moment saturated by digital interfaces, disembodied labor, and algorithmic surveillance, a new wave of performance artists are turning back to the body, not out of nostalgia, but necessity. This isn’t a return to “liveness” as fetish or purity. It’s a deliberate reanimation of the body as a volatile archive of risk, eroticism, ritual, and refusal. A politics of flesh.
These artists are not using the body to represent. They are using it to rupture. Their performances engage pain, slowness, collapse, care, and spectacle—not to sensationalize, but to interrogate what remains unrenderable in a world of smooth surfaces. These bodies tremble, leak, blur, and endure. They are unstable systems that demand new ways of seeing, sensing, and staying with.
In this edition of Reading the Field, we trace how five artists, Florentina Holzinger, Julie Tolentino, Davi Pontes & Wallace Ferreira, Harald Beharie, and Alex Baczyński-Jenkins, are staging extreme embodiment as a response to contemporary conditions. Their strategies are as distinct as their contexts, but they share an insistence: the body still matters, especially when it is too much.
To read the full essay—including in-depth artist profiles, video links, and performance resources—join our network on Patreon.
Your support keeps this work independent, international, and artist-driven. –> patreon.com/pformart
By subscribing at the $10/month level, you’ll unlock this month’s full Reading the Field and gain access to our growing archive of field reports, opportunities digests, and curatorial features spotlighting the future of performance.
