Barbara Kruger’s wrapped school bus can be seen driving around Manhattan and parked outside various Performa venues throughout the Biennial. Grounded in activism, feminism and community, Kruger’s signature text is reproduced on a large-scale vinyl format, covering the bus’s forty–foot-long shell.

Barbara Kruger uses her instantly recognizable—and frequently appropriated—visual style of delivering highly charged, terse phrases in white Futura Bold font over red blocks to deliver messages around consumerism and feminism inside a skate park, and other public places. 

Created in partnership with NYC Parks and skate park designer Steve Rodriguez, Barbara Kruger will employ her signature effects and strategies to broadcast messages that engage issues of and ideas about power, desire, adoration, contempt, and capital at New York’s most popular skatepark underneath the Manhattan Bridge.

Commissioned since Performa 09, the Hub, this year designed by Berlin’s Studio Miessen, is the nerve center and heart of the biennial’s and the Performa Institute’s presence. Spontaneously intersect with staff, books, screenings, events, and artist-in-residence Kenyan literary network Kwani Trust.

Zanele Muholi is best known for the portrait series Faces and Phases (2006–ongoing), capturing LGBTQI life in her native South Africa. She spreads her #VisualActivism throughout New York City, publicly exhibiting her photographs, performing queer music, and organizing with black LBTQI communities.