Jordan Roth Turns a Venice Biennale Performance Into Collage and Rupture
At a Renaissance palazzo in Venice, Jordan Roth made destruction look deliberate. On 7 May, the US multidisciplinary artist presented a performance at Palazzo dei Fiori during the Venice Biennale, tearing apart vinyl prints of Irene di Spilimbergo and reworking the fragments into collages as classical music played.
The event, staged in collaboration with Performance Space New York’s Visionaries Circle patrons group, drew a notably art-world audience. Among those present were Scott Rothkopf, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and London dealer Kristin Hjellegjerde. The setting — a grand Venetian interior — gave the piece a ceremonial stillness that contrasted with the physical act at its center.
Roth’s subject was Irene di Spilimbergo, the 16th-century Venetian polymath whose image became the material for his intervention. Rather than treating the prints as fixed representations, he broke them apart and refashioned them in front of the audience, turning the frame into a site of transformation. The project statement described the gesture succinctly: “Bound within the frame, Roth and the paintings are fused together, muse and artist becoming one.”
The performance also extended Roth’s visibility beyond Venice. Earlier in the week, he drew attention at the Met Gala in New York with a “living sculpture” look, underscoring the way his practice moves between fashion, performance, and visual art. In Venice, however, the emphasis was less on display than on process — on the tension between image and object, reverence and rupture.
That balance made the work feel especially apt for Biennale week, when the city’s historic spaces are filled with competing forms of spectacle. Roth’s performance stood out not because it was loud, but because it was exacting: a quiet reassembly of fragments in a room built to hold attention.
