Trace: Performance and its Documents was an exhibition that drew on relationships between performance and its documents, bringing together new commissions with historical and contemporary works from across the Gallery’s Collection. The exhibition includes works by John Baldessari; Barbara Cleveland; Rebecca Horn; Bruce Nauman, Mike Parr; Campbell Patterson; Qin Ga; Carolee Schneemann; Sriwhana Spong; Song Dong; Ai Weiwei; Gosia Wlodarczak; Erwin Wurm; Zhang Huan, and more.

Spanning an array of cultural contexts and varying sorts of performativity – feats of endurance, repetitive actions, shamanistic rituals, vaudevillian acts – the works also ranged wildly in tone: from sublime to icky to out and out funny. Whether images, texts or objects, ‘Trace’ gives presence to the residues that stop performance disappearing altogether.