VB48 Performance

Vanessa Beecroft’s work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models (often nude). At her performances, video recordings and photographs are made, to be exhibited as documentation of the performances, but also as separate works of art. Hence, the artist’s work and her conceptual approach is negotiating a space between performance and documentary, often evoking renaissance painting. Beecroft sets up a structure for the participants in her live events to create their own ephemeral composition, presenting themselves according to their own internalized aesthetic system.

The performances are existential encounters between models and audiences, their shame and their expectations. Each performance is made for a specific location and often references the political, historical, or social associations of the place where it is held.

VB48 took place at Palazzo Ducale in Genoa as part of the G8 summit of world leaders in July 2001. The dramatic space and the chiaroscuro lighting of Baroque painting inspired the concept of the performance. Beecroft’s work is deceptively simple in its execution, provoking questions of identity, politics and voyeurism in the complex relationship between viewer, model and context.