Threshold

Trained as a dancer, artist Alexandra Pirici fuses choreography, performance, and visual arts across her practice. In many of her artworks, she uses enactment and embodiment as strategies to reimagine historical events, re-mediate internet memes and digital images, and perform sculptural additions to public monuments.

For the High Line, Pirici invites a group of performers to build a moving, porous threshold at the gate that separates the eastern and western Rail Yards on the High Line at 30th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues. For the work, Pirici creates an embodied and flexible architectural “boundary” from the performers’ bodies, but one that can be negotiated and transformed.

The performers’ movements reference historical and aesthetic thresholds both real and imagined, with different functions, such as a barricade from the Paris Commune and the fictional borders built by war and conflict in Francisco Goya’s iconic “Disasters of War” prints. As the performers’ bodies and movements shift, passersby will be able to pass through, but not without having to encounter the performers in one way or another.

Performers include Marissa Brown, Catherine Cabeen, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Samuel Hanson, Casey Hess, Jordan Isadore, Jhia Louise Jackson, Annie Kloppenberg, Elizabeth Mulkey, Candace Tabbs, and Jessica Weinstein.

Organized by Cecilia Alemani, Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator, and Melanie Kress, High Line Art Associate Curator.