Boris Nieslony, Germany

Boris Nieslony is recognized as one of the most prolific and significant contributors to performance art. Born in Cologne, Nieslony has worked extensively as a performance artist, curator, archivist and independent scholar; staging various installations, interventions and artist projects since the 1970s. He is the founder of Black Market International, a performance group that meets regularly in various configurations to realize group performance projects and ASA, a foundation for self-organizing a network of performance artists and theorists.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Boris Nieslony dedicated himself to painting, photography, installation, performance, intervention, Copy-art and art actions. His work can be categorised as being along the lines of European anti-formalism which, via Fluxus, goes back to Situationist International, Dada. If, on the one hand he feels concerned by historicism, on the other, he puts on ephemeral performances based on the logic of very specific conceptual physical responses. While Nieslony is also actively producing his own work, from 1985, he initiated ASA-EUROPEAN, which is focuses as an international project of services in the Art of Performance, an extensive archival bank of information dedicated to curation, organization and investigation in the field of performance art and time based art. It has helped managed and organized various series of performance art conferences and forums in various countries.