World Ends Day is an online symposium organised by Ends that brings together artists and thinkers to consider our shared durational ends—corporeal, political, organic; and yet, intangible, capitalist, and planetary.

Eventually, all ends. Ends are biological as much as they are social, phenomenological as much as metaphysical, and embodied as much as impalpable. Yet, in contrast to the omnipresence of narratives reflecting the ends of the human, the planet, and democracy (among others), we find the ends declared in dystopic, utopic, and other visions in between do not arrive. Like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, we are perpetually waiting, ending, but never quite so. The ends have been unmoored from a chronological timeline and have transformed into a chronic condition of mourning.In performance studies and in contemporary performance practices, theorists, and practitioners have explored the affective, aesthetic, and political resonances of these ends in different ways. Ends proposes to take the ends as multiple, as an ontological overlap of finitudes and to develop collective epistemes of the end. To that end, the World Ends Day will be an occasion to imagine, discuss, and share perspectives on what the performance theory of our ends might be. And beyond, how might we push performance theories to consider the ends of performance beyond the potency of the ephemeral and the production of alternatives? What is performance (theory) as a means without ends?

World Ends Day 2021

9 July

Part Ⅰ: Steve Dixon (LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore), Amanda Piña (Artist and Cultural Worker, Mexico-Chile-Austria), Eva Horn (University of Vienna, Austria).

Part Ⅱ; Rustom Bharucha (Writer and Dramaturg, India), Zarina Muhammad (LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore), Shankar Venkateswaran (Theatre director, India).

Convened by Felipe Cervera, Kyoko Iwaki, Eero Laine, and Kristof van Baarle and supported by the University of Antwerp Research Centre for Visual Poetics and LASALLE, University of the Arts of Singapore. The event was part of Performance Studies international’s Constellate 2021 platform.

World Ends Day 2023

23 September

Part I: Rachel Hann (Northumbria University), Saodat Ismailova (French artist), and Ho Tzu Nyen (Singaporean Artist).  

Part II: Rebecca Jarman (University of Leeds), La Marr Jurelle Bruce (University of Maryland), and Janine Randerson (University of Auckland).

Convened by Felipe Cervera, Kyoko Iwaki, Eero Laine, and Kristof van Baarle and supported by the University of Antwerp Research Centre for Visual Poetics, UCLA, and the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Janine Randerson would like to acknowledge the artist-performers (Sarah Cameron Sunde, Amiria Puia-Taylor, Kingi Peterson; Angela Tiatia, Alicia Frankovich)  and photojournalists (Raymond Sagapolutele, Charlotte Lawson) for the performance images featured in the talk “End of land-worlds, rise of water-worlds:in 11 movements.” All image copyright belongs the artists, photographers and featured news sites (New Zealand Herald), organisations (NASA, Getty Images), or the author (Janine Randerson) if unspecified. This presentation is for scholarship and teaching purposes only. See more detail on the performance artworks in the forthcoming book chapter: Janine Randerson and Amanda Yates, Performing Environments with more-than-human whanaunga (kin). In Performance Art in Aotearoa New Zealand: An Anthology. Wellington: Massey University Press, 2024.