Berlin and Seoul-based artist Haegue Yang came to international prominence in the early 2000s with ambitious installations that combined abstract, often suspended or performative forms with domestic objects such as venetian blinds, light bulbs with electric cables, and metallic bells reminiscent of pagan and shamanistic rituals. The visually striking effects of her installations implicate notions of cultural connections––and dissonance––between domesticity and the public sphere, industry and craft, abstraction and narration. Yang revels in the in-betweens of these binaries, drawing from a life-long oscillating preoccupation with alienation, otherness, and what the artist calls a “community of absence.”

In addition to her prolific exhibition career of rich sculptural productions and multi-sensorial installations, Yang has committed herself to a book by the legendary French author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, namely her 1982 novella The Malady of Death, by staging it in various forms and translating it in different languages. The novella explores a mysterious tryst between two figures identified as “You” and “She,” isolated in a seaside hotel room for an unspecified period of time. Told in Duras’s minimal yet haunting prose, “You” attempts to learn “how to love,” but “She” diagnoses him as suffering from the “malady of death,” a condition of emptiness caused by the inability to find love and pleasure in a world ruled by gendered and colonial power dynamics.

Yang’s encounter with The Malady of Death was through French theorist Maurice Blanchot’s 1983 book The Unavowable Community, which concerns the impossibility of community in a fractured world. It sparked Yang’s decade-long obsession with the novella. Beginning with her initiation of the novella’s Korean translation in 2008 as well as Chinese translation, commissioned by M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong in 2015 and a public reading at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN) in 2010, Yang has adapted Duras’s text into a site-specific, hypnotic monodrama. Versions of the monodrama have premiered at Namsan Arts Center (Seoul, 2010), Staatstheater Kassel, commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, 2012), the Sunbeam Theater, commissioned by M+ (Hong Kong, 2015), and in a cenote, a type of sinkhole, in the rural Yucatán region of Mexico (2016) hosted by kurimanzutto.

For Performa, Yang collaborates with Laurence Olivier award-winning actor Noma Dumezweni to present her sixth version of The Malady of Death in the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Peter B. Lewis Theater at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Taking advantage of the theater’s circular design, Yang’s spectral staging will highlight the lone performer whose singular presence will be refracted throughout the space using pre-recorded video and sound, amplifying the obsessive atmosphere of the text.

Curated by Charles Aubin.

Co-produced with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, with the generous support of the Guggenheim's Asian Art Circle. Additional support provided by kurimanzutto, Lonti Ebers, and Miyoung Lee.

Performa Biennial 2023 Commissions are supported by Commissioning Council members, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Noma Dumezweni (b. 1969 Swaziland, present-day Eswatini) is a South African-British actor who first established herself with notable performances for the Royal National Theatre, the Young Vic Theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the UK. She played Hermione Granger in the original West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016–present) in London, which subsequently had a successful run on Broadway in New York in 2017. Her role earned Dumezweni a Laurence Olivier Award in 2017 and a Tony Award nomination in 2018. In 2022, she performed in A Doll’s House, Part 2, a play written by Lucas Hnath that continues the story of Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 classic. In addition to her theatrical successes, Dumezweni has appeared on numerous television shows, including Only Murders in the Building, HBO’s Made for Love, Ryan Murphy’s The Watcher, and the HBO limited series The Undoing. Dumezweni plays Queen Selina in the Disney musical film The Little Mermaid and appears opposite Liam Neeson in Retribution (both 2023).