In this talk, I will share my journey as both a performance artist and the founder of Performance Art Week Aotearoa (PAWA), offering insight into Aotearoa New Zealand’s dynamic performance art landscape over the past 15 years.
As a curator, I have shaped PAWA as a space for radical diversity—a festival where contrasting approaches to performance collide, converse, and celebrate. Since 2017, through four festivals and countless satellite events, I’ve championed work that is experimental, site-responsive, and socially engaged. Over 40 events have unfolded in unexpected places: cemeteries, abandoned bunkers, government lawns, and the ocean itself. I’ll share pivotal moments and performances from these events, where artists from across Aotearoa and internationally have challenged themselves and audiences to delve into the unknown. As an artist, my practice is driven by emotional excavation—a feminist methodology that embraces discomfort as a creative compass. I channel raw, often challenging feelings into embodied works. These performances become rituals of vulnerability where personal and political histories intersect. I’ll present selected images and videos to illustrate this process, revealing how intensity transforms into action. I will also discuss my series of collaborations with other artists and how that has inspired and influenced me.
Together, these threads—curatorial and personal—reflect my belief in performance art as a vital force: one that disrupts, connects, and insists on staying alive.
“NIGHT SCHOOL NY INSIGHT” Vol. 56
Saltwater & Skin:
Performance Art From The Bottom Of The World
Lecture: Sara Cowdell
Host：Jody Huang
May 26th, 2025 (Mon)
Sponsor: UP-ON Performance Art Archive
Sara Cowdell
Sara Cowdell is a New Zealand performance artist and curator. She is the director and founder of Performance Art Week Aotearoa and previously the performance curator at Playstation Gallery. As a performance artist, Cowdell utilises multiple modalities including dance, costume design, video, collaboration, installation, and photography to explore society through a formalised and qualitative intimacy.
Drawing on her background in Anthropology, she engages in ethnography through interviews and conversations. These conversations form the conceptual core of her work, where the communion between interviewer/interviewee resonates across spatial, somatic relationships. Cowdell’s work strives for a raw viscerality and lingers on the uncomfortable textures of lived experience.
As a curator, Sara’s work explores and expands on traditional art boundaries and instead focuses on experiential and participatory engagement with an overarching ethos based on experimental, site-specific and socially engaged practice. She has curated over 40 performance events, workshops, discussions and exhibitions. She works extensively to both present performance art and to develop performance art practises across New Zealand and abroad.
Works
Green Witches Stare, performance video, 2018
Losing Touch, onsite performance, 2020, Melbourne, Australia
Associations(Associates)
Performed as part of the Audio Visual Arts Festival Corfu 2023
DEATH.BIRTH.DEATH.DANCE,
on-site perfromance, 2017, Bethalls Beach, New Zealand
