Work of art as an event - performance restructured in imagination

An exceptionally interesting case of performance in contemporary art are artworks, in which artists do not present a performance itself but rather its effects. For these artists a performance is somehow included in the tissue of the artwork; it was indispensable for the artwork to be created, yet it is hidden so the viewer needs to make an effort to reconstruct this performative character of the artwork and understand (become aware of) the resulting consequences. The text analyses works by Akira Komoto (the Seeing series), the realization by Lech Twardowski (Generator Bez Maszyn), three series of works by Urszula Wilk (Niewysłane listy) as well as selected sculptures by Shen Shaomin (the Bonsai series). Although in these works we deal with various forms of performativeness, their joint feature is the fact that in each of them the viewer must discover and reconstruct the hidden performance in his/her memory.