Vanessa Beecroft - Performances

Performances

Beecroft’s first exhibition was VB01, in Milan, 1993, in which she presented a series of drawings along with the past eight years of her Food Diary. The following year she exhibited in New York for the first time, at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. Later in 1994, VB08 took place at P.S.1 in Long Island City, NY.

More recently, in VB39, 1999, and in VB42, 2000, the artist explored the possibilities of fully male performances with the U.S. Navy in San Diego, CA and with the U.S. Silent Service at the Intrepid in New York, respectively.

Beecroft's performances have taken place at many notable art institutions: VB28 at the Venice Biennale in 1997; VB35 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1998; VB40 at the MCA, Sydney, Australia in 1999; VB43 at the Gagosian Gallery in London in 2000; VB45 at the Vienna Kunsthalle in 2001; VB50 at the São Paulo Bienal, Brazil in 2002; VB52, part of a retrospective show, at the Castello di Rivoli in 2003; VB54 at an exhibit called Terminal 5 at the TWA Flight Center of JFK Airport in 2004, an exhibition that closed abruptly after the building itself was vandalized during an opening party.

VB55, a recent example, featured one hundred women standing still in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie for three hours, each woman oiled from the waist up and wearing nothing but a pair of pantyhose. It was staged in April 2005.

In October 2005, Beecroft staged a performance on the occasion of the opening of the Louis Vuitton store on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. For the same event, Beecroft placed models on the shelves next to Louis Vuitton bags.

Beecroft's work—specifically VB48, at the Gagosian Gallery in California—has come under fire by feminist artist groups like the Toxic Titties. Beecroft does not acknowledge the time commitment, exertion, and treatment endured by her models, leading critics to question the conceptual ideas put forth in her work.

Rialto, Venezia / Dettaglio articolo / Magazine di arte] in Venice on 8 June 2007. It involved "approximately 30 Sudanese women lying face-down on a white canvas on the ground, simulating dead bodies piled on top of one another" and represented the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.

Beecroft’s attempt to adopt Sudanese twins was the topic of the documentary The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, which was included in the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition.

One of her recent performances, VB65, took place at PAC in Milan in March 2009, and featured a "Last Supper" of African immigrants, legal and illegal, dressed in suits, eating chicken without cutlery.