Los Angeles-based artist Vita Kari made waves during last year’s Art Basel Miami Beach after law enforcement showed up in response to their performance piece staged outside the convention center. The unsanctioned performance invited viewers to pour water on the artist as they sat inside a can-shaped plexiglass container. Water came from pallets of cans featuring the artist’s likeness, designed to look as if they were trapped inside.
During the performance, which was interrupted by a Miami Beach code compliance officer in response to a complaint, Kari told Artnet News that they make work to “offer a disruption to the doom scroll” as a digital artist, but that they had also begun making such disruptions in real life, inspired by glitch feminism.
“That was actually the first performance piece I ever did, and it absolutely changed the course of my life,” Kari says of the 2023 Miami Beach performance, which highlighted water inequity and also functioned as an “experiment on empathy.” Since then, Kari has pulled off other performances, like one in which they were taped to a wall, but it was really an illusion. “The video piece circulated online and we made a fake newscast about it, and that was the performance piece in itself,” they tell us.
This week, after a whirlwind year finishing their MFA, blowing up on TikTok and broadening their practice to include tapestry works, Kari returns to Miami Beach for another guerilla performance outside Art Basel, in addition to a show at Untitled Art Fair with Yiwei Gallery. Titled “Close the Door,” Kari’s new performance is planned for this Saturday, December 7 between Art Basel and Design Miami. (“Hopefully we can pull it off again, and if, not subject to change.”)
I think sometimes the way to talk about these things is through humor and play.
Like previous performances, “Close the Door” is an endurance piece in which Kari will be enclosed in a small space for a few hours. This time, the space is a playhouse-sized bathroom, shining a light on bathroom accessibility (or lack thereof) in cities. “While it's not the most glamorous topic, I think it definitely deserves a highlighted moment,” Kari says. “I think sometimes the way to talk about these things is through humor and play, so I know this will be a way to bring it to the forefront of everyone's mind.”
Humor and play are integral to Kari’s artistic practice. With the new tapestry works on view at Untitled, inspired by their grandmother’s quilts, Kari plays with the idea of tapestry as the “original pixel.” And while not positioned as “fine art,” Kari’s viral TikTok series “The craziest thing about being creative” is an addictive and humorous play on reality, disrupting viewers’ feeds with intricate illusions built into seemingly simple videos, featuring makeup and jewelry made out of paper, for instance.
“Ultimately, I've just been developing what performance can look like, especially through a virtual lens as well,” Kari says of their evolving work. “I finished my MFA and I'm now an artist in the art world, showing in multiple galleries and really just experiencing all that virality, plus the wonderful art world has to offer.”