Eleanor Antin challenges the boundaries of identity, gender, and social roles, merging performance, photography, film, drawing, writing, and installation into a provocative, multidisciplinary practice. For her, art functions as a vehicle to question fixed notions of selfhood and societal expectations, allowing fluid shifts between conceptual projects, performance personas, and photographic narratives depending on each work’s conceptual demands. Antin often begins with her own body or personal experiences, transforming them into characters or alter egos such as kings, ballerinas, or nurses. Through performance and documentation, she constructs narratives that blur reality and fiction, past and present. Her photographic series, video works, and installations translate ephemeral actions into tangible forms, creating immersive experiences that invite viewers to question identity, power, and cultural norms. Her work frequently incorporates seriality and conceptual strategies, as seen in projects like 100 Boots, where she used images of boots to create a distributed narrative across time and space. This process of repetition and dissemination transforms everyday objects and personal interventions into symbolic carriers of meaning. Antin’s practice emphasizes the transformative and reflective power of art, engaging audiences in a dialogue about self-construction, memory, and the performative nature of identity. ...
