Whitney Biennial 2024 Performance Program: FEELING$ FEELING$ FEELING$ by Alex Tatarsky

Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, Alex Tatarsky’s live performances are highly responsive to venue and audience, careening between scripted sequences and unfettered improvisation. As part of the performance program organized by guest curator Taja Cheek for Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, they will chew up remnants of past works and spit them out alongside new investigations prompted by thematics they identify throughout the exhibition: unpredictable weather patterns, intestinal discomfort, the American flag as a poem and a warning. Acting as a vessel for materials to speak through, they treat the associative language that emerges as sculptural material to be bent and disassembled.

A trained clown, Tatarsky embraces the figure of the bouffon, a European clown type said to live in the swamps at the edge of the kingdom, who was not only allowed to mock the king’s power but rewarded for it. Over the course of the Biennial, the artist will conduct covert research throughout the Museum. Methodologies include eavesdropping, spirit channelling of inanimate objects, and taking Lower Manhattan’s buried wetlands as a prompt: letting that which lies beneath the surface seep, leak, and flood.