PERFORMANCE CLUSTER 2025 – Discipline Desire Surveillance

This year’s edition was developed in collaboration with Yale University and draws inspiration from Elise Morrison’s book Discipline and Desire: Surveillance Technologies in Performance Art. In this volume, Morrison analyses how surveillance technologies — from drones and CCTV cameras to facial recognition — shape communication, entertainment and control in contemporary society. Tools often perceived as symbols of power and discipline, but which can be subverted and transformed into means of “turning the gaze” back onto power itself.

Nine international female artists — Vanshika Agrawal, Sofia Arredondo, Anna Fischnaller, Alice Kasdan, Abigail Murphy, Bianca Polakova, Kateryna Sopielkina, Nadia Vallino and Julia Vasconcelos — will embody this tension. How can female artists disrupt and rethink the dominant structures of discipline and desire? How can surveillance technologies become tools for mutual communication rather than one-way control?

Through actions suspended between risk and freedom, these women transform the very technologies that observe us into living, pulsating artistic tools, leaving the viewer with an open question: who is watching whom?

Convened by:
Elise Morrison — Associate Professor at Yale University
Marta Jovanović — Performance Artist and RUFA lecturer

Head of Production:
Ada Uygan — Multimedia Artist and Exhibit Designer