Christian Jankowski

In Hooping Guggenheim, Jankowski challenges the interaction between the individual artist and the institution.The artist chooses the Guggenheim Museum as his sports partner in this work, having spent decades working with and within the frameworks of several institutions in the roles of artist, curator, and professor. While the performers embody natural bodies and movements, the architecture of the museum artificially infiltrates the choreography. The corporeality of each performer deconstructs the weight of the institution itself, blending the natural and the artificial into an organic performance.

A model of the building’s quintessential rotunda shape was created in separated parts which the artist stepped into, lifted up, then spun around his body in a hula hooping fashion and tried to keep in the air for as long as possible. The action was documented in the photo studio of Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, resulting in a framed series of photos in black and white. Which later, alongside the model of the museum, was checked in as oversized luggage to be exhibited in a Performa Anniversary exhibition hosted in a gallery across the street from the iconic institution in New York City.