Directorial Statement

What LIVE Biennale has captured in live performance art in the last few years is the fullness of a complete sensorial experience – motivated by our desires for feeling, sensing and community. 

Feeling Tenderness as the title of LIVE Biennale 2025 encompasses two meanings: 

1. Medical Sensation: In medicine, tenderness is a sign of pain or discomfort that occurs when a specific area of the body is pressed or touched by a clinician.

2. Gentleness and Affection: This is the most common meaning, describing someone who is kind, loving, and compassionate towards others.

To make affective change is to shift or alter the environment of our emotional state, feelings, or sentiments is a response to both definitions of tenderness. Feeling itself is affective, which is why tenderness is 1.

An awareness of our anxiety, a product of what theorist Ann Cvetovich calls “public feelings” – which are related not only to health but to an “embodiment of what it means to be human¹” and 2.

The desire to change our relationships with the social, environmental and familial. This sense of equilibrium between balancing our own internal rhythms with the world around us is central to many of the performances and activations for LIVE Biennale 2025. 

Derrick Chang, Managing Director 

¹Ann Cvetovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

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