Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Thesis - Restricted Access (SIA Only)

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Art Business

First Advisor

Leo Krakowsky

Second Advisor

Agnes Berecz

Abstract

This thesis starts from a concrete scene: an ordinary junction that, for a few minutes, is reorganised by noise, smoke, bodies and cars into a circular event commonly known as a street takeover. The project does not seek to classify these events as art, nor to redeem them aesthetically. Instead, it asks a more precise question: what happens when a phenomenon like the street takeover is read with tools developed by performance to think about body, risk and presence? Methodologically, the thesis combines phenomenological description, formal analysis of the scene and a set of concepts drawn from performance studies and mobility studies. It revisits the genealogy of risk in performance from the 1960s and 1970s, with particular attention to Chris Burden’s actions, and places this alongside accounts of car culture, infrastructure and urban inequality in the United States. The sources include art-historical and theoretical texts, scholarship on automobility and the city, and audiovisual and journalistic material on street takeovers. The analysis proceeds in three movements. First, it reconstructs how performance turned risk, co-presence and disappearance into central materials, and how Burden’s work condenses these concerns in extreme form. Second, it situates the car as an everyday body–machine assemblage within a city shaped by speed, control and uneven exposure to the state. Third, it describes the street takeover in detail and reads its architecture; centre and edge, shared risk, crowd as operative element, circular time, double life as event and video, through the lens of performance. The thesis argues that this lens does not explain why takeovers occur, but makes them legible as a contemporary form of organising space, danger and attention. In doing so, it suggests that street takeovers crystallise a mode of presence characteristic of the present: brief, hybrid and tense, where intensity overrides narrative and the city can be rewritten, for a moment, around a circle of metal, bodies and risk.

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