Joan Jonas Hon RA (b. 1936)

“I didn’t see a major difference between a poem, a sculpture, a film, or a dance,” Joan Jonas has said. For more than five decades, Jonas’s multidisciplinary work has bridged and redefined boundaries between performance, video, drawing, sculpture, and installation.

Joan Jonas was born in New York in 1936. She studied sculpture and art history at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. After graduating with a BFA and traveling in Europe, she studied sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at Columbia University, New York, where she received an MFA in 1964. Immersed in New York’s downtown art scene of the 1960s, Jonas studied with the choreographer Trisha Brown for two years and was influenced by literature, Noh and Kabuki theater, and art history.

Adopting the idea of art-as-process, Jonas turned from painting and sculpture to performance art, systematically yet intuitively exploring different aspects of how live events could be structured in time and space. Her early performances, called Mirror Pieces (1968–71), were held in large spaces and incorporated the use of large and small mirrors, either as a central motif or as props. Beginning in the early 1970s, Jonas’s works became increasingly symbolic and ritualistic. In Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972), for example, Jonas took the role of Organic Honey, a part-real, part-mythical, and part-fantastical woman who explores the possibilities of female imagery and eroticism, repeatedly scanning her own image in a video monitor connected to a live camera. Later that year she began producing single-channel videos, such as Vertical Roll (1972), in which she used performance, static, and repetition to investigate the inherent formal qualities of video. By the early 1980s Jonas had begun to create complex, nonlinear narratives premised on literary and historical texts, including science fiction (Double Lunar Dogs, 1984) and medieval Icelandic sagas (Volcano Saga, 1989). More recently she has made works based on H.D.’s epic poem ‘Helen in Egypt’ (Lines in the Sand 2002) the writing and biography of the art historian Aby Warburg (The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, 2004), the writing of H.D. (Lines in the Sand 2002/5) and Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ (Reading Dante, 2007-10). In 2015 she represented the US at the 56th Venice Biennale with the exhibition They Come to Us without a Word.

Jonas continues to produce her most urgent work through immersive multimedia installations that address climate change and kinship between species. “Despite my interest in history,” she has said, “my work always takes place in the present”.

Jonas’s work has been the subject of several major retrospectives, including exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (1979); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1983, 1994); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany (2001); Queens Museum of Art, New York (2004); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2014); Tate Modern, London (2019); Dia Art Foundation, New York (2021) and Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2022). Forthcoming solo exhibitions in 2024 include Good Night Good Morning, Museum of Modern Art, New York and Joan Jonas: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Drawing Center, New York.