More than fifty years ago, Joan Jonas performed her Mirror Pieces for the first time. She was in her early thirties, searching for ways to make the female body visible as a contested territory while freeing it from external attributions. “The mirror was a metaphor for me,” she once explained. “A means of changing the image and involving the viewers as reflections, so that they feel uncomfortable when they see themselves in public.” As part of Perform!, the festival series at the Neue Nationalgalerie, her groundbreaking piece is being revived. From 10.–14.09.2025, in the afternoons on the museum’s terrace, performers will demonstrate how much feminist potential mirrors and Plexiglas panes still hold today. Reflections are also central to the work of Corey Scott Gilbert, aka vAL. The artist, who began his career as a solo dancer with the Lyon Opera Ballet, uses mirrors not to fragment his own body, but to observe the audience. In his new work Bellied, he reverses the roles of performer and viewer.

Isaac Chong Wai also seeks to involve the audience. Represented at the 2024 Biennale with a video work exploring spatial experience through choreography, he now presents The horizon we can never touch. In this performance, participants adjust their body height so their heads form a straight line — some kneel, others rise onto their tiptoes. What matters is the negotiation that culminates in the horizon line. Who follows whom? Who defines the norm as the group arranges itself along the Neue Nationalgalerie’s 50-meter-long glass façade? The power of the collective also lies at the heart of Yoko Ono’s performance, Bells for Peace. The premise is simple: anyone who wishes to take part brings a bell (or borrows one from the Nationalgalerie, while supplies last). At the close of the festival on Sunday (14.09), which also marks the end of Ono’s exhibition Dream Together, participants ring their bells in unison for peace. Ono demonstrates how a small instrument can produce an enormous sound. Whether such sounds will hasten peace is uncertain, but they will fill the Berlin evening air with sweet music and hope.

Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Florian Hetz, Joan Jonas, Iain Macmillan / Credit: Artists Rights Society (ARS), VG Bild + Kunst Bonn, 2025, New York, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone; Yoko Ono

Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str.50, 10785 Berlin–Tiergarten; map

Perform! 2025 – The fourth annual performance festival for Berlin Art Week features Joan Jonas, Isaac Chong Wai, and Corey Scott Gilbert, with a closing performance by Yoko Ono, 10.–14.09.2025. Admission to all events is free.

@neuenationalgalerie