13 Rooms

With over one hundred performers presenting new and reimagined works by some of the world’s best-known contemporary artists, 13 Rooms ran for eleven days at Pier 2/3 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay to great acclaim and attendance. 13 Rooms included previous and future Kaldor project artists Marina Abramović, Allora & Calzadilla, John Baldessari, Xavier Le Roy, Roman Ondak, Tino Sehgal and Santiago Sierra, alongside major international artists Joan Jonas, Damien Hirst, Simon Fujiwara, Laura Lima and Xu Zhen, and emerging Australian artist duo Clark Beaumont.

The project was conceptualised by Klaus Biesenbach, then-director of MoMA PS1, New York, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, then co-director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, as an innovative group exhibition of “living sculptures” in purpose-built rooms. 13 Rooms was originally commissioned by the Manchester International Festival in 2011 as 11 Rooms, and grew to 12 Rooms at the 2012 International Arts Festival Ruhrtriennale in Germany.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, John McDonald described the works of 13 Rooms as “a celebration of performance art that conceives the human body as a portable sculpture”.