Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft

With “Miracles in Reverse”, Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft presents the work of pioneering U.S. American artist, musician, and performer Julia Heyward. As one of the key figures of the New York underground art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Heyward developed a distinctive performative practice that combines Mongolian throat singing, comedic ventriloquism, spoken-word poetry, and sound effects. Her performances address questions of belief systems, class, and gender through associative and often experimental means.

Driven by a desire to reintroduce “narration, emotion, melody, and light” into an era dominated by Minimal and Conceptual Art, Heyward turned to motifs and formats drawn from television within the context of the Pictures Generation. References to “Saturday Night Live” and stand-up comedy evolved into multimedia performances in which video projections, props, music, and text coalesced into immersive “live cinema experiences.” At the same time, she produced video performances that continued her early role-playing experiments and anticipated both the music video format and the subsequent MTV era. As part of the New Wave and post-punk movements, Heyward released an album under the pseudonym Duka Delight. Her music is presented at the Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft, alongside self-portraits, documentation, storyboards, video performances, and music videos, all embedded in a scenography by Celeste Burlina.

“Miracles in Reverse” is accompanied by a video and film program curated by Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff. The program brings together moving-image works produced in New York from the 1970s through the early 1990s by artists including Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, and Howardena Pindell, reflecting the artistic and political milieu that shaped Heyward’s practice.

Julia Heyward (*1949, USA) earned a BFA from Washington University and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City in 1973. In 1984, she received the Bessie Award for Dance and Performance, followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; The Kitchen, New York City; the Daejeon Municipal Museum, Daejeon; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; South London Gallery, London; and Bonner Kunstverein. In 2015, the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco mounted her first institutional solo exhibition.

“Miracles in Reverse” marks Julia Heyward’s first solo exhibition in Europe. On March 6, a subsequent solo exhibition will open at Westfälischer Kunstverein. The accompanying research for both projects will be incorporated into a joint monographic publication on Heyward’s work, to be published in summer 2026 by Mousse Publishing.

Curator: Nele Kaczmarek
Assistant Curator: Leonie Schmiese