Since its beginnings, performance art has questioned the status of the body under capitalism and challenged the traditional role of the object in art by presenting audiences with an artwork that cannot be owned, but exists in the here and now. It is in this legacy that After Laughter Comes Tears exists. But performance art is increasingly also part of a culture shaped by the event-economy, which is among the best ways to attract audiences and provoke content for social media. If so, what are the potentials for performance today, when it is, as the visiting critic Kristian Vistrup Madsen recently wrote in Artforum, ‘trapped inside a fashionable spectacle of (social)’? This curated walk takes visitors through selected works of the exhibition to reflect on the relationship between performance art, capitalism and the institution.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer and critic based in Berlin. In his recent writing he has explored spectacle and submission, the possibility of criticism in contemporary painting, and the 00's as the ‘decade of cruelty’. Madsen is the author of Doing Time: Essays on Using People, a book about correspondence and appropriation, which was published by Floating Opera Press in 2021.