Tonight, Sydney Guild will open its doors for a 12 hour durational performance event, created and performed by Frances Barrett. Yes, you read that correctly. 12 hours.

From 8am to 8pm, Barrett “will enact a finite revolution in the gallery space of Sydney Guild.”

This kind of epic performance – durational performance, if you will – is having a bit of a moment in the local art scene, with the mainstream success of 13 Rooms and the wide reach of ‘The Artist Is Present’ (a documentary about Marina Abromović). However, these practices are not new. In fact they go back quite a while, often in the form of activist gestures.

A recent work by John A. Douglas called ‘Body Fluid II (redux)‘ was a 10 hour performance where Douglas enacted his uncomfortable, lengthy dialysis routine in public, while dancing and wearing a gold lycra suit. Sounds like something you’d take your mum to, right? While the absurdity of seeing a middle-aged man in lycra might be enough to attract a crowd on its own, there’s a lot more to it. Once that initial image has washed over the audience, an intimate peek into Douglas’s personal journey is revealed, and valuable insight into the issue of organ donation in Australia is gained. Similarly, ‘The 12-Hour Revolution‘ explores the relationship between activism and performance in a gallery context.