Station 2 examines performance art of today, 40 years after Nam June Paik’s unprecedented avant-garde performance, which transgressed the border line between art and non-art. Various performance pieces, presented in the form of an exhibition, suggest the subtle boundary between visual art and performance. Each of the approximately 20 performances appearing in the festival, including Romeo Castellucci’s , is a completed work on its own, assembled together in an exhibition space.
The performance program exists like a book, with each page assigned to a specific performance. Although the program binds together the performances it does not weave them together into an overarching concept. This book, we are comparing the program to, is not a novel and all the pages are not to be read in a sequence. Instead each page is only an attempted description of each performance and as such is unable to convey the totality of the experience it offers. Inserting the performance program into the existing narrative premises of the exhibition heightens awareness of the tensions that result from the unavoidably partial views one can have of any exhibition.

The productions coexist only within the frame created for them as the program inserts itself into the exhibition space. Therefore, the different time frames of each performance create a shifting assemblage within the galleries; from theatrical installations that will last for the entire period of the exhibition to temporary performances that will last only for twenty mins or six hours. This shifting assemblage means that as the specific spaces, times and durational places are produced and reproduced by each different performance, the circuits within which they habitually operate, and the ones they are now inserted into, become exposed.

The ambition for this exposure is to question the rigidity of the conventional notion of exhibition making as it comes into being. This is especially relevant when what is in question is the notion of creating a retrospective and the indebtedness to art historical references this implies. The temporariness of the performance program and the vulnerable assemblage of its spatial arrangements challenge the overwhelming architectural intervention into the exhibition space and the narrative threads intended for the exhibition. The inevitable historicization of Nam June Paik’s legacy will be juxtaposed with the program’s diverse set of contemporary performance practices. In doing so, the irregularities and ephemeral nature of the narratives surfaced by the exhibition are highlighted and resonate with what Nam June Paik himself pointed out as the common territory of video art and performance.