Paper Dance is both a retrospective spanning thirty years of work by the New York–based artist Janine Antoni (Bahamian, born 1964 in Freeport, Grand Bahama) and a solo dance performance developed in collaboration with pioneering dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin (American, born 1920 in Wilmette, Illinois). On view on the second floor of the Jones Center, The Contemporary Austin’s downtown venue, Paper Dance consists of a wooden dance floor and thirty-nine crates containing thirty-eight works of Antoni’s sculpture and photography from 1989 to the present. During the exhibition, Antoni will present a series of performances within the gallery. Throughout each performance the artist will reposition and uncrate artworks so that the space changes and evolves over time, highlighting three exhibition cycles that address major themes of Antoni’s work: absence, motherhood, and identity.¹

If the framework for the Paper Dance performance is a shifting arrangement of Antoni’s sculpture and photographs, the constant is Antoni herself, moving throughout the installation with a long roll of brown paper. Antoni wraps, tangles, and rolls her body, alternately clothed and nude, in and out of the paper’s sculptural folds as she responds to her past works in the present moment. Each performance is an opportunity to see the artist address the sculptural language she has developed throughout her career. In her words, Paper Dance takes Antoni’s studio process and makes it visible: “I am performing the act of making, and the audience witnesses my thinking in space.”²