Performer/Audience/Mirror (2020) by Keren Cytter

Keren Cytter reinterprets Dan Graham’s Audience/Performer/Mirror through a feminist lens. The performance opens up with the female performer reading a poem about her father. She stands behind the camera, hidden from the scope of the contemporary lens. Somewhere within the monologue, the male performer emerges from the crowd, which he had initially used to disguise himself. He makes his way to the mirror at the end of the room, turning to the crowd. The reinterpretation of the performance begins at this instance, when the male interacts with the crowd. When the performance ends, the audio-recorded version of the female performer reading the poem is echoed amongst the crowd. Despite the fact that Cytter's piece shares the same title as Graham's 1975 adaptation, her reenactment highlights the ways in which gender has influenced both the creation of the original work and how we interpret it.

Performer/Audience/Lens (2020) by Emile Zile (Reinterpretation)

Digital technologies and social networks allow performances to transcend boundaries of time and geography. Emile Zile places himself squarely in front of the audience in his work Performer/Audience/Lens. A video camera is positioned behind him to capture his live performance, which is then projected onto the screen so that viewers may view him from both sides. In the first section, Zile simultaneously narrates his own movements and the audience's response to them. In contrast to Graham, however, he recounts not just these movements but also his bodily processes, such as the release of endomorphism, sweating, etc., which shifts the focus of observation to the body's "outside" and "inside”.

With a direct note to the audience, "I am the performer and you are the audience," Zile acknowledges that there are, in fact, many lenses which are constantly observing all individuals present during the performance. By this, he alludes to his own and the audience's mobile devices, the constant notifications from his phone, such as Uber requesting a five-star rating, and the underwater cables that visually represent the internet's journey. The performance changes and gets darker around halfway through. The distances that are specified now encompass more than just the space between the performance and the audience. At this juncture, Zile looks away from the crowd and begins speaking to them via the screen whilst initiating an instagram live-stream from his device. He types on his phone, drawing in the two audiences: one physically present in the room and the virtual audience observing from the instagram live-stream. To conclude the performance, Zile openly reflects on the possible ways in which will be able to visit his performance in the future, bringing light to the importance of documentation for the moving-image complex.

Mirror.leegte.org (2020) by Jan Robert Leegte (Performed by Miron Galić)

Jan Robert Leegte's Mirror.leegte.org (2020) features a single performer portrayed by Miron Galić, Leegte's former student at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in The Hague. Galić takes his place on the stage in front of his computer and a microphone as soon as the show begins. A close-up of his face is displayed on a screen behind him. 

On the screen, there are two pointers. One is movable, while the other is stationary. Using one of the pointers, the performer slowly revolves it around his somewhat open mouth. He then circles his left and then right eyes with the pointer. Following these steps, the performer faces the empty stage and screen that displays only the pointers while seated among the audience. Next, the Galić-operated pointer gradually advances across the screen until it meets and rests atop the second static pointer. 

Using the pointer, an indicator that shows the current position for interaction on a monitor, Leegte's piece rewrites the relationship between the performer and the audience. It is more of a remediation and reinterpretation than a replication of the original. The question of what happened to the performer in the reenacted work is raised by this judgment. In this instance, the performer utilises the pointer to highlight his mouth and eyes, which are our tools for describing and taking in the environment. His mouth is an empty hole that does not make words, and only his eyes appear to notice the pointer.

Graham's original performance takes a radical approach to its self-referential character, which was that it was always already a replay of itself. In Leegte's work, it is the mirror that depicts the relationship between the two screens (the computer and the projector) and their implicit agents (the audience and the performer), with the machine left to "perform" the work on its own in the end.

Audience/Performer/Mirror (2020) by Rietveld Academie students 

UNFOLD culminated with many reinterpretations presented by van Weelden’s pupils at the Rietveld Academie, which centered on remediating Graham’s original work. The students had previously engaged with reinterpretation and re-enactment during Weelden's course ‘Unstable Media’. Consequently, LI-MA invited the students to participate in the UNFOLD program by concentrating on the function of reinterpretation and remediation in response to Dan Graham’s work. These interpretations and reenactments provided intriguing new perspectives on Graham's original work and its potential relevance to our day.

Similar to Zile's piece, the students mirrored and reflected the audience on social media, reducing the performer's position to that of an interpretation of online content and, in doing so, reflecting (flipping) the dynamics at play in Graham's original work. In this case, the audience records and recounts the act, leaving the performer as the sole one watching it.

Exhibition: Documented Reinterpretations

The De Appel documentation of Graham's iconic work was shown in the LI-MA’s UNFOLD workshop along with several reinterpretations, including Judith Hopf's What Do You Look Like/A Crypto Demonic Mystery (2006), Adad Hannah's Performer Audience Remake (2008), Ian Forsyth & Jane Pollard's Audience Performer Fuck Off (2009), and some documents related to the 1977 version of the work at De Appel.