Performa is a non-profit arts organization widely recognized for its groundbreaking live performances by visual artists and the Performa Biennial — a festival of performance art that happens in various venues and institutions in New York City every other year.

The organization recently launched its first-ever 8-hour global Performa Telethon fundraiser, broadcasted live from Pace Gallery, featuring a star-studded line-up of newly-commissioned performances and limited edition “home goods” from a selection of the world’s leading artists. Performers include Derrick Adams & Dave Guy, Laurie Anderson, Jérôme Bel, Torkwase Dyson, David Hallberg, Glenn Kaino, Ragnar Kjartansson, Lang Lang, Marching Cobras, among many others.

The editions for sale include original designs by Korakrit Arunanondchai, Barbara Kruger, Kia LaBeija, Michèle Lamy and Katerina Jebb, Laurie Simmons and David Bers Architects and Cindy Sherman. Highlighted editions include Kruger’s porcelain vase imprinted with the texts “CULTURE” and “NATURE” in black and blue, Michèle Lamy and Katerina Jebb’s functional serving tray made of a scenographic portrait of Lamy imagined by Jebb, and Korakrit Arunondachai’s Mother Pillow which is an extension of the artist’s practice of creating body pillows that are part of his painting and video installations which audiences can recline and sit on.

Commemorating the organization’s 8-hour global Telethon fundraiser.

PERFORMA LAUNCHES LIMITED EDITION "HOME GOODS" BY MICHÈLE LAMY, BARBARA KRUGER AND MORE

Two creative minds from very different worlds, Michèle Lamy and Kim Kardashian have formed a supportive relationship since meeting in 2013. Here, the pair are photographed wearing each other’s designs in a shoot guided by the photographer Paul Kooiker. A project conceived during lockdown – Lamy in France, Kardashian in the US, Kooiker in the Netherlands – the result is a celebration of an unexpected kinship.

Kim Kardashian and Michèle Lamy’s friendship seems, on the face of it, to be an unlikely one. In June this year, the Dutch photographer Paul Kooiker gave precise instructions to both about how to shoot these portraits while they were in lockdown in their homes in Wyoming and Paris respectively. Two women in isolation, two portraits of women that could not be more different. One in a restless fit, the other pensive and venerable. Both are located in a photographic past: Kardashian’s portraits reminiscent of filmmaker Robert Bresson, Lamy’s of the photographers Bernhard and Anna Blume, all located in a time less gruesome, at a time of greatest uncertainty.

Kardashian and Lamy met in Paris seven years ago. Lamy is 11 years older than Kris Jenner, Kardashian’s mother. Lamy and Kardashian are both iconic women, albeit for very different reasons and to very different people – people who we’d assume don’t have much in common, let alone share a common sense of reality, which is what makes this relationship so interesting.

But how do we even start comprehending the complex notion of contemporary reality? My reality is very likely different to your reality – Kardashian’s different to Lamy’s, the US’s different to Europe’s, the UK’s different to Germany’s. At times, it seems we are simultaneously dealing with 7.8 billion separate realities, a world fragmented into the debris of its old order, individuals thrown back onto themselves, questioning everything that has structured and conditioned our thinking, our behaviour, everything that we thought we knew. Whatever the financial crisis of 2008 didn’t manage, Covid-19 has: it unmasked some of the ugly structures that order our world – a world that appears as a naturalised state of permanent crises. In other words, hope, hopelessness and iPhones – innovation, wealth and poverty – are all created by the very same economic conditions.

Presenting a special project realized during lockdown, performed by Michèle Lamy and Kim Kardashian, conceived and directed by Paul Kooiker – a visual attestation to Lamy and Kardashian’s perhaps unlikely friendship.

COVER STORY: A PROJECT PERFORMED BY MICHÈLE LAMY AND KIM KARDASHIAN

The Italian artist Fabio Viale presents a story of degradation and restoration at the Galleria Poggiali in Florence, Italy, as part of his ongoing exhibition "Acqua alta high tide". Many truncated statues and fragments of vessels, arms, and heads of stone are reborn as noble work of art in a new spectacular display looking like a waterfall of marbles. 

The Piedmont artist has exhibited 18 tons of stone chippings and marble sculptures cascading from the ceiling into the floor, filling the Florentine gallery's white space. The art installation, titled 'Emergences,' is a transposition of the artist's "Root'la" performance carried out in Gioia quarry of Carrara. The artwork resembles a portion of the 'Raveneto' quarry, an area where useless rubbles and chippings discarded during quarrying, traditionally cast downhill, generating a rocky marble waste slope. Viale replicated the process as part of the "Root'la'" show, hurling down several previously acquired and intentionally varied marble sculptures which resulted in the statues being cracked and mutilated and their parts destroyed. The disfigured artifacts, partially shapeless, have been retrieved and used for the gallery's monumental display. 

"The scene illustrates a process of decay and rebuilding, falling and redemption," reads a statement from the gallery. "Viale has addressed the process of returning to the source and moulding of the artifact-work." The deliberate alteration of the shape and surface reinforces the vital power inherent in the material: "Scared of every figurative quality that linked it to the model, the sculpture now shows itself to be authentic, becoming a metaphor for human experience."

Fabio Viale was born in Cuneo, Italy. He began working professionally as a sculptor following his studies at the artistic high school and at the Turin's Accademia di Belle Arti.

What if Rick Owens and Michele Lamy presented an installation made of shards and wrecks of their furniture pieces. How would it look like and what could be the message behind the artwork? Never hesitate to share your ideas with us!

Italian artist Fabio Viale returns to Florence with a solo show at Galleria Poggiali.

Think about Jónsi and what it is that comes to mind? Maybe the Icelandic mountains, the Ryan McGinley-shot Sigur Rós album cover from 2008, or falling asleep to the sounds of his 2009 collaboration with Alex Somers, Riceboy Sleeps. You might also think about nature and the beauty of the well-captured field recordings that have long existed in his work, providing our fragmented world with the perfect score. 

Jónsi launched his first solo single in a whole decade last month, perhaps knowing we needed it. "Exhale" is a flippant piano composition co-produced by A.G Cook of London's PC Music, somewhat spontaneously — the organic creations of one artist meeting the more experimental outlook of another. The accompanying music video has been directed in collaboration with actor Giovanni Ribisi, and follows a dancer moving in monochrome. 

Jónsi, still locked up at home in Los Angeles, alone except for his dog Atlas, has turned to cooking: creating his own incense and posting video guides to create his own special recipe for chili oil. "Aside from being slightly ill with COVID-19, I loved being at home and working on different artistic feats," he says. He's well past the worst of it by the looks of things and back to appreciating the little events in his life: chewing frankincense resin, admiring the jacaranda blossom in his neighborhood, and watching monarch butterflies circle the flowers in his backyard.

Jónsi is quick to remind you, given his many creative outlets, that there is zero pressure to keep at it. "When you're not feeling creative you don't have to be creative," he says. "You don't have to feel bad for doing something. You don't have to clean your room, you can slow down and be introspective. 

Since Jónsi's music has long been a go-to get us through stressful times, we thought we should seek advice from the master and ask him to make us a playlist of self-isolation. Opening with thirty minutes of "Wood-masted Sailboat" (close your eyes and you're rocking slowly on the ocean), the four-hour collection takes us through a thunderstorm, past a humpback whale choir and via Times Square, for a crowd-based nostalgia spot and a reminder of what it used to be. A bath of sound to match all others. "Close your eyes and listen to the outside indoors," Jónsi says of his treatment.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1doqhOJ7rZy9NxlRGywDhX

Several times, designer Rick Owens would be giving inspirational playlists ahead of his shows. Bryan Black of Black Asteroid released an album featuring Zola Jesus, Cold Cave, and Rick Owens's wife Michele Lamy.

Jónsi made us the ultimate calming self-isolation playlist.

With diamond-decked teeth, fingers stained black, Paris-based Michèle Lamy is truly one of fashion’s most revered eccentrics. Entrepreneur, collaborator, producer, wife, and business partner to Rick Owens, she has given life to one of the industry’s most celebrated labels alongside countless collaborations and a Gareth Pugh partnership – all while prevailing as a gothic fashion legend in her own right.

Her teenage years in Paris informed her identity. In the late 60s, during the height of the Parisian students’ unrest, when Michèle was moonlighting as a stripper and working as a defense attorney simultaneously, she found her clan. “At 18, I didn’t look so different from now,” she pauses. “I was hanging out with transvestites like my friend Hélène Hazera but also being inspired by Marlene Dietrich and Jean-Luc Godard, and movies like Pierrot le Fou. They pushed me to do my own thing.”

Lamy is the perfect partner for Owens’s erudite humor. His nickname for her is Hun, as in Atilla. She was born in Jura, France, and refers to her family as mountain folk. She’s very vague about her background. During the 60s and 70s, she worked as a defense lawyer, while studying with the postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze. She then worked as a cabaret dancer and toured France before moving to America in 1979.

At the 2016 Venice Biennale, Lamy transformed an old container ship into a floating saloon. The same year, she recorded songs with her good friend, rapper A$AP Rocky. Rocky said about Lamy, “Hardly anyone knows how important you have been behind the scenes for my career. You did not just design my album covers; you took me to art fairs and showed me the art world.”

In 2017, Lamy and Rick Owens were featured in Lou Stoppard’s book about fashion’s most important and iconic duos, titled Fashion Together: Fashion’s Most Extraordinary Duos on the Art of Collaboration. In the book, Owens said that Lamy was more his “mate” than “muse.” And, “I don’t think anyone would ever think of Michèle as a passive muse. I think that’s why she sparks people’s interest—because she doesn’t fit the typical role of a muse.”

Lamy has practiced boxing for 35 years. In 2018, she set up her own boxing gym “Lamyland” in Selfridges, London. The space previously was home to A$AP Rocky’s AWGE Bodega. It is now reinvented every few months. In October 2018, Lamy curated a performance series featuring a tour of “Outsider Art Fair Paris” by British performance artist David Hoyle.

In January 2019, Lamy held an installation art “Genius You” in collaboration with Dutch photographer Paul Kooiker, taking place all around Selfridges, London. From May to November 2019, her boxing installation: “What Are We Fighting For?”, had been shown in Venice Biennale.

Lamy said about her approach to fashion and design, “I like to really be with a lot of people and exchange ideas, and the best way to be is to do something together, so I’m easily seduced… And when it’s the idea, or I want to lead a bunch of people somewhere and do something together, I think that’s generous.”

She has given life to one of the industry’s most celebrated labels alongside countless collaborations.

MICHÈLE LAMY: CLOTHING DESIGNER, PERFORMER, FILM PRODUCER, AND RESTAURATEUR

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