On the occasion of this year's Berlin Art Week from 10 to 14 September 2025, the Neue Nationalgalerie is showing the fourth edition of the PERFORM! festival series with performances by Joan Jonas, Isaac Chong Wai and vAL. In addition, the participatory performance Bells for Peace by Yoko Ono will take place on the Tag im Grünen (Day in Greenery) on 14 September 2025. All events are free of charge.

As in previous years, a historically groundbreaking performance forms the core of the PERFORM! program: Mirror Piece I & II (1969/2025) by Joan Jonas will be performed once a day on the terrace of the Neue Nationalgalerie from 10 to 14 September 2025. On Sunday, 14 September, the performance Falling Reversely (2021/2024) by Isaac Chong Wai, which was presented at the last Venice Biennale, and a specially produced work by vAL will also take place.

All events are free of charge. All performances and events take place in areas of the museum that are also accessible without a ticket. In the event of limited capacity, admission will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis. Participation without registration, unless otherwise stated.

Joan Jonas: Mirror Piece I & II (1969/2025)

Wednesday, 10 September to Saturday, 13 September 2025: 5.15 to 5.45 pm
Sunday, 14 September 2025: 4.15 to 4.45 pm

Location: Neue Nationalgalerie terrace

Mirror Piece is a groundbreaking performance created and first performed by the American artist Joan Jonas in 1969. The work is considered one of the earliest and most influential examples of feminist and conceptual performance art in the USA and was instrumental in redefining the boundaries between visual art, performance and gender representation.

Several performers carry mirrors and plexiglass plates in synchronised, choreographed movements. As the piece unfolds, the moving mirrors reflect and fragment the audience, the performers and the environment, blurring the boundary between audience and actors. Movement director: Nefeli Skarmea.

The mirror was a metaphor for me. A device to alter the image and to include the audience as reflection, making them uneasy as they view themselves in public.

Joan Jonas

Joan Jonas (*1936, New York) is a pioneer of performance and video art who has been working with mirrors, texts and body movements since the 1960s. Her works thematise identity, gender and perception and have had a lasting influence on contemporary art.

Performers: Caroline Beach, Jennie Boultbee, Florencia Martina, Tatiana Mejía, Mica Kupfer, YeoJin Kim, Mila Nhu-Nhien Horst, Zeina Hanna, Ana Libório, Narin Mohammadi, Obitse Omagbeni, Kareth Schaffer, Benca Ungvari, Tim Winter, Betül Yildirim

Movement Director: Nefeli Skarmea

Corey Scott-Gilbert | vAL: Bellied (2025)

Sunday, 14 September 2025: 3 to 3.30 pm

Location: Neue Nationalgalerie terrace

vAL aka Corey Scott-Gilbert’s newly commissioned piece Bellied gathers what is left in the aftermath of shattered reflections to insist on new sketches of possibility – reimagining beyond fractured hopes. Charged with constant scepticism and questioning, the performer moves through an empty set of bleachers using mirror fragments to keep an eye on the audience's gaze, lurking closer and closer until eventually infiltrating the audience. Questions remain: How do we reposition ourselves for better reflections? What can be assembled out of splintered thoughts?

Corey Scott-Gilbert (*1983) is an American artist based in Berlin. With an inherently queer perspective and off-grid aesthetic, Scott-Gilbert highlights the absurdities of a hopeless social dynamic, presenting curated situations where joys are not sought after but devoured as a means of restoring a malnourished existence. The artist’s personal history of movement serves as a vehicle for interrogating their own breath, a process in which collaging word-play and physical utterance often serve as the foundation for their multidisciplinary playgrounds under the artistic identity vAL.

Music and Sound Design: Turkana
Dramaturgy: Dasniya Sommer
Wardrobe: SADAK

Isaac Chong Wai: The horizon we can never touch (2014/2024)

Sunday, 14 September 2025: 3.30 to 4 pm

Location: Neue Nationalgalerie terrace

The horizon we can never touch is a performance by Isaac Chong Wai that invites participants to stand across a window, facing the audience on the other side, and adjust their height to align with a horizontal line above their heads. Each performer takes turns posing as the model, according to whom the others adjust their height. The work highlights the subjectivity of norms and standards, and how easily they can shift: Who is leading the game? Who do we all follow to meet so-called standards? For this iteration, the performance will take place along the 50-meter-long glass façade of the Mies van der Rohe building. The work was previously presented at the Inside-Out Art Museum, Beijing (2025), at HKW, Berlin (2017) and the Immigration Office Gallery in Bremen (2015).

Isaac Chong Wai (*1990) is an artist based in Berlin and Hong Kong who uses drawing, glass, photography, video and performance as mediators to explore contemporary global phenomena. His work transforms the emotions, tensions and memories of human interactions into performative materiality and immersive experiences. Straddling the boundary between the individual and the collective, he explores the vulnerability of the body and the inherent violence in social systems and historical trauma.

Yoko Ono: Bells for Peace (2019/2025)

Sunday, 14 September 2025, 5 to 5.15 pm

Location: Neue Nationalgalerie terrace

Bells for Peace is a participatory performance by Yoko Ono, rooted in her long-standing practice of engaging audiences through collective participation and shared actions. The work invites people to come together—physically or symbolically—to ring bells in unison, creating a sonic act of hope, solidarity, and the possibility of change. Ono has used bells and communal acts through sound in different ways over the decades; this upcoming iteration draws on the large-scale public performance first staged in Manchester in 2019.

Presented as the concluding gesture of her exhibition DREAM TOGETHER, and as the highlight of the “Tag im Grünen” event, Bells for Peace raises awareness for non-violence. We ask all participants to bring a bell to ring together for peace. Those who do not have a bell will be provided with one on site – while supplies last.

Yoko Ono (* 1933, Tokyo) is an artist whose thought-provoking work challenges our understanding of art and the world around us. She has distinguished herself across multiple disciplines, from film and art to music and writing. Since the 1960s, Yoko Ono’s art has demonstrated the transformative power of collective action in the pursuit of peace and the vision of another world.

Think PEACE, Act PEACE and Spread PEACE.
Together, we will shift the axis of the world to PEACE.
I love you!
Yoko

Curators

PERFORM! 2025 is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, with Lisa Botti, curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and Gregor Quack, Volkswagen Group Fellow, FREUNDE der Nationalgalerie.

PERFORM! Performance Festival

For the past three years, the Neue Nationalgalerie has organised the PERFORM! performance festival during Berlin Art Week. In addition to historical positions by Yvonne Rainer (2024), Yoko Ono (2023) and Simone Forti (2022), contemporary contributions by Göksu Kunak, Miles Greenberg, Enad Marouf, Bendik Giske, Dafni Krouzadi, Constantin Hartenstein and Billy Bultheel were on show.

The programme takes place as part of Berlin Art Week.

The American Academy in Berlin is partner of PERFORM! 2025.

An event series by Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz