Aria Dean's The Color Scheme investigates how virtual production technologies can revolutionize our understanding of architectural history and spatial memory. Taking Berlin's Tiergarten as its subject, the project creates an immersive theatrical environment that reconstructs the sculptures present in the park via an encounter between two pseudo-fictional Black American artist-intellectuals circa 1923 using the Unreal Engine software program. This digital reconstruction serves as more than backdrop—it becomes an interactive architectural archive that reveals how public space and monumental sculpture shaped ideological narratives in Weimar Germany. Through real-time visualization and environmental modeling, the project demonstrates new methodologies for experiencing and analyzing historical architectural spaces. By merging game engine capabilities with theatrical presentation and live film production, the work advances groundbreaking approaches to architectural pedagogy and conservation, allowing audiences to witness how the built environment evolved over time. The Color Scheme ultimately proposes a new framework for architectural research that bridges historical documentation, spatial computing, and performative engagement.

Aria Dean is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City. She has exhibited widely in the United States of America and internationally, with recent exhibitions including Facts Worth Knowing at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2024); Aria Dean: Abattoir at Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2024); Figuer Sucia at Greene Naftali, New York (2023); Abattoir, U.S.A! at the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2023); and Quiet as It’s Kept: Whitney Biennial 2022 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022), among others. Her first book of collected writing, Bad Infinity: Selected Writings (Sternberg Press 2023).

Jeanette Bisschops is a Dutch curator, researcher, and writer based in New York. Before joining Performa as a Hartwig fellow, Bisschops held roles as curatorial fellow at the New Museum, New York, and assistant curator at the Time-based media department at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She received her master’s in psychology from Maastricht University and a master’s in art history from the University of Amsterdam. Bisschops is the founder of the platform Performance Talks, a project dedicated to researching the intersections of performance, dance, theater, and visual arts.

Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi is a curator and writer working in New York, serving as curator and manager of curatorial affairs at Performa. Previously, he was an assistant curator of performance for Made in LA 2020: a version (2020) and a curatorial associate at the Hammer Museum, where he coorganized Hammer Projects with Vamba Bility (2024), Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi (2024), and Andrea Fraser (2019), among others. Onyewuenyi also worked on Fraser’s This meeting is being recorded (2021), which premiered at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and the Hammer Museum. Other notable projects include coorganizing Joan Didion: What She Means (2022) with Hilton Als and Connie Butler. Onyewuenyi’s research explores performance in digital media, photographic epistemology, and African diasporic aesthetics.

Madeleine Seidel is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn, New York, and Atlanta. Seidel is currently an assistant curator at Performa, where she began as a curatorial assistant in 2022 ahead of the Performa Biennial 2023. Previously, Seidel was a Lazarus Curatorial Fellow at the Artist’s Institute at City University of New York, Hunter College, and a curatorial research assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is also a regular contributor to Frieze, Flash Art International, Burnaway, Brooklyn Rail, Interview Magazine, Artforum, and other international publications. Drawing from her upbringing and early work experiences in Alabama and Georgia, Seidel’s curatorial and editorial work focuses on performance, film, and new media in the American and Global South(s).

Vic Brooks is a producer and curator who develops films, performances, exhibitions, and programs. She leads the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab, is curator-at-large for Aspen Art Museum, and serves on the board of Atelier Calder. A nominee for the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards, she is currently developing feature films with Aria Dean, Sierra Pettengill, and Martine Syms. She is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Curatorial Research Fellowship and Teiger Foundation grant for the exhibition Shifting Center (2023) presented during her tenure as associate director for the arts and senior curator of time-based visual art at Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2013–24).

Filip Kostic is an artist born in Belgrade, Serbia and currently lives in Los Angeles. Kostic addresses the increasingly blurred distinctions between embodied and “virtual” experience, through sculpture, games, and animation. Kostic has participated in exhibitions at various venues throughout the United States and Europe including the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, Eugster Gallery in Belgrade, Ars Electronica, and Alyssa Davis Gallery in New York City. He worked as the lead technical artist on a Virtual Reality experience for the Harry Potter Wizarding World franchise, has collaborated with brands like Nike, and with artists like Lil Yachty and Team Rolfes to create interactive and immersive experiences.

Performa is the leading organization dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the twenty first century. The Performa mission is to commission new live performances by exceptional contemporary artists; to present the international Performa Biennial in New York City; to offer public education programs, broadcasts, and exhibitions that illuminate the critical role of live performance; and to disseminate performance related content, context, and research. Performa was founded by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg in 2004.