Take a Look at the 2025 Performance Art Festival Line-up

The program of the Performance Art Festival Bodies Craving to Believe will open at 7:30 p.m. with Aliza Orlan, a Bratislava-based visual artist working across drawing, textile installations, performance, and poetry. In her performance and installation thorns grow out of my body, she draws on portrayals of femininity in fairy tales, mythology, and pop culture. Following at 8 p.m. will be artist Dominik Styk with an absurd dance burlesque Pissed Prophet, in which personifications of a bladder and a fish act out a story that weaves together physiological processes of the human body with their anthropological interpretations. From 9 p.m., Danish violoncellist CTM and dancer Skjold Rambow will present their joint project Bow, first performed at German audiovisual festival Berlin Atonal 2023. The piece stages a dialogue between contemporary dance and cello music with classical elements.

At 9:30, Slovakian artist Miriama Kardošová will embrace her alter ego diva Victoria Oren to premiere a new performance, Shake my hair over the dirt we sweat off, in which she “encounters her own femininity and fights against patriarchal expectations and stereotypes, which she sings over and shouts down in lively and hysterical euphoria”. Penultimate performance will be delivered by Amsterdam-based eva susova who explores the connections between embodied knowledge, the female voice, and systems of power and control. In collaboration with fellow artist Publik Universal Frxnd, they use breath, laughter, and spoken word, combined with live cello performance, to create a performative “queer assemblage with a touch of eroticism.” Wrapping up the program at 11:30 p.m. will be Austrian artist Alex Franz Zehetbauer with a queer stand-up show sixsixsix, in which he takes on the character of a jester who “transforms reality”, foregrounds repressed and uncontrollable areas of human physicality.