Performance: Did you ever want to be someone else?

Mark Wallinger’s contribution to this year’s Turner Prize is Sleeper (2004-05), a film of a performance in which, over a period of 10 nights, he dressed in a bear suit and wandered aimlessly around an art gallery in Berlin, startling unsuspecting passers-by.  He relives the long nights for TateS ...

This performance recreates the groundbreaking work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica. Frustrated by the limitations of painting, Oiticica devoted himself to finding ways in which painting could be taken off the gallery walls and out into 3-dimensional space. One result was his ‘Parangolés’ of t ...

Ulla von Brandenburg is interested in the idea of the tableau vivant, or 'living picture'. Popular in the nineteenth century, the tableau vivant was a combination of fine art and theatre, with live models carefully posed and lit in a composition like that of a painting or photograph. In this per ...

Matei Bejenaru put out a call to fellow Romanian nationals, asking them to gather as a crowd outside Tate Modern to take part in a public performance. Here he introduces his own film of the event, Together (2007). Bejenaru is one of the artists in the exhibition The Irresistible Force, at Tate M ...