How do you collect something ephemeral?

Collectors are increasingly redefining value by acquiring material traces of time-based art

- Avantika Bhuyan

While Tino Sehgal's practice is deliberately immaterial, collectors acquire the right to the work through oral contracts.

(GETTY IMAGES)

Can there be a price affixed to a form that is temporal and created in response to the viewer? Being a work of art, a performance piece too is subject to the vagaries of the art market.

Though performance exists within a specific time and space, it is increasingly developing an afterlife. Ushmita Sahu, director and head curator, Emami Art, is noticing that documentation through video, photography, sound and scores is being conceived as independent artwork rather than mere record. Sculptural elements, costumes and objects emerging from performances also carry forth their conceptual and emotional residue. Collectors and institutions are showing greater interest in their material and archival traces, recognising performance art as both transient and collectible.

According to Farah Siddiqui, a Mumbai-based contemporary art consultant and founder of FSCA Art Advisory, collectors across the world approach performance art through rights, instruction and stewardship—increasingly through institutional frameworks that enable longevity. The genre's commercial viability depends less on objects and more on informed collectors willing to participate in its ethical and temporal dimensions. “In this sense, performance art doesn't resist the market, rather it compels it to adapt,” she says.