David Valinsky writes. In fact, he wrote for this very platform interviewing icons like Alessandro Michele and Andre Leon Talley and was an editor with ODDA for a few years, he regularly haunted the 2010s era fashion weeks – but that was before he decided he’d take on something more, performance.
His performances are still very much embedded in the artifice of fashion, making the woman the centre, exploring what being women clothed and unclothed in Balenciaga feels like, under the gaze of multiple others, engaged in fluid movements that feel like they’ve been done a thousand times before, like a ritual. Sometimes Valinsky conducts performers to walk down a church aisle as if on a runway. At other times, it’s reckless abandon in fashion party-coded places like the middle of a dinner table or the floor interspersed with afterparty tinsel. But where does he situate himself among this?
To lay out his place in the performance world, Valinsky sits down with METAL to discuss his practice ahead of his next show in September at Parrish Art Museum.
How do you define your performance practice?
It’s a living architecture of instincts, rituals, and choreographed ruptures. We build experiences that hover between theatre, installation, and social experiment — spaces where intimacy, voyeurism, and collective myth-making all fold into each other.
How did you move from writing into performance?
Language was always the first portal. My texts felt too restless to stay on the page; they wanted bodies, friction, breath. Performance became a way to rupture the fixity of words, to make literature sweat.
What role does fashion, in terms of both clothes and also other factors, have in your performances?
Fashion is an extension of the skin. It’s also a dialect of fantasy, status, fragility, and aggression. Costuming is not decoration for me, it’s a structural element, a kind of emotional architecture that often carries the story more than dialogue.
How do you work with other members of your group for performances? Do you have a fixed group or is that fluid? I think many of your performers are also models?
It’s fluid by design. Yes, I often work with recurring actresses — my muses — because there’s a psychic shorthand there, a trust that lets us go deeper. But I also pull in external dancers or performers depending on the needs of each piece. The overlap with models isn’t accidental: there’s an awareness of gaze and pose in their bodies that fascinates me.
How do you work with places and spaces in your practice, as the performances are situated in many different spaces?
Space is always a silent main character, and I study the geometry, the historical residues, the psychic temperature of each place then I let the work grow from those constraints. It often dictates the narrative of the show. I love pushing against the edges of what a space is supposed to hold. The music is also very important. Usually, it contradicts the space and creates this unease and awkwardness that I like.
You primarily work with women in your artistic practice. What influenced this decision?
I was raised by strong independent women, not just figures but living archives of resilience and contradiction. The female body carries layers of meaning, a palimpsest of desire, danger, and cultural projection. My practice is a meditation on these inscriptions: how to amplify, fracture, and reclaim them. It’s a terrain where intimacy meets power, vulnerability becomes resistance, and identity is always in flux.
The female body is something that’s really emphasised in your work. Do you wish to elaborate on this? How is the male gaze relevant to your curation around the female form?
I like to disassemble the male gaze by overexposing it. To let the female body perform its own mythology, not just be an object of consumption. Sometimes that means embracing spectacle, sometimes it means breaking it, but always on the woman’s terms.
Who or what are you inspired by?
Fluxus and Russian avant-garde. Pagan rituals that survive modernity. The tension between opulence and ruin. Also, people inspire me a lot and the entire show can be based on one person and his life story.
What was the last performance you saw that struck a chord?
Anne Imhof’s show at Park Armory last March. An apocalypse staged by the young, desperate to feel something before the world burns. It was beautiful and moving experience.
How do you visualise your practice in the future, or what is a performance you really want to do?
I imagine my work as a dialogue with institutions not as monoliths, but as living entities laden with memory and authority. Through collaboration, I seek to unsettle their inertia, to weave performances that interrogate how history, power, and embodiment intersect. My ambition is to create ritual spaces where spectators become participants in an unfolding meditation on time, transformation, and collective memory.
What are the narratives or stories you wish to work on?
I’m fascinated with the decay of the world we live in, how structures rot in plain sight while we invent new idols to keep from drowning in meaninglessness. The female body becomes both relic and prophecy here: fragile, exposed, yet holding codes for what might come next.
I’m curious about humanity’s craving for fresh absolutes in an age allergic to certainty. How we build spiritual scaffolding out of chaos, how we fetishise ruin because it feels more honest than forced optimism.
I’m curious about humanity’s craving for fresh absolutes in an age allergic to certainty. How we build spiritual scaffolding out of chaos, how we fetishise ruin because it feels more honest than forced optimism.
