Untitled (The Drop) is back Barbara Kruger’s capsule collection with performa and ITEM IDEM
«The t-shirt becomes the new vehicle of the artwork. The body becomes the medium. Wearing it is a continuation of the performance: its circulation, its activation, its public life» With this statement, ITEM IDEM claims the artistic and performative practice of Barbara Kruger, moving through subversive slogans, Futura Bold and color schemes. The capsule? An invitation to take part in the artist’s discourse on the sensitive issues of contemporaneity and the media world.
Performa, the internationally acclaimed organization dedicated to live performance, celebrates its 20th anniversary with the relaunch of Untitled (The Drop) by Barbara Kruger. First presented at the Performa 17 Biennial in 2017, Kruger’s project returns as a limited-edition hoodie and t-shirt, now also in French and Arabic thanks to the collaboration with ITEM IDEM in Paris.
We asked Cyril Duval, aka ITEM IDEM, to introduce the project to us. In doing so, he draws attention to the need to recontextualize and expand the discourse already opened by Kruger: «what I found most important within this project is the recontextualization within the European landscape. The multilingual aspect finds expression in Barbara’s artistic practice, as seen in her recent work in Ukraine, “Untitled (Another Again),” which transposed the Ukrainian alphabet onto the walls of a train. The cultural context today, eight years later, is simply more complex. This is why a multilingual edition carries even greater value and expands the discourse by extending Barbara’s work into a different traffic, a different circulation — polylinguistic, but also through garments available in Europe and shipped worldwide». Thus, in 2025, ITEM IDEM brings the artist’s incisive slogans onto garments.
Launched on October 20, 2025, The Drop will be available for pre-order on Performa’s website, on Instagram and at ITEM IDEM store in Paris, and will arrive in New York from November 1 to 23 at the Performa Hub. A reactivation that invites the public to enter the artist’s discourse on market, language and identity — this time through shopping, in all its forms.
«The return of The Drop highlights the unique role of Performa as a leading platform for live performance», says RoseLee Goldberg, founding director and chief curator of Performa. «Our 20th anniversary is not only a celebration of pioneering artists like Barbara Kruger, but also a reaffirmation of Performa’s mission to preserve and reactivate landmark works for future generations». Duval’s intention is to revisit the status of the artwork through the capsule: «by extracting the authority of the original piece and allowing it to operate outside the privileged walls of the museum. These are elements of the artwork itself».
At the core of the project is relational aesthetics, which is also reflected in the in-store shopping experience — spaces conceived as “conceptual supermarkets”: «what matters is how the audience perceives the work in its global dimension. So naturally it embodies a form of relational aesthetics, because there is a sofa, a TV screen, and conversational cues even within the window displays». Ultimately, The Drop demonstrates how Kruger’s work continues to move beyond the canonical spaces of art, infiltrating reality through objects, bodies and languages. A revival that does not celebrate the past, but reignites the conversation both inside and outside of shopping.
