Archive Display | Ephemeral Actions: The Performance Works of Peter Roche and Linda Buis

Between 1979 and 1985, artist couple Peter Roche (1957–2020) and Linda Buis (1954–2015) created 25 performance works, focusing on ‘people in interaction’. Emerging during a highly experimental period in Aotearoa New Zealand performance, Roche and Buis pushed the boundaries of unscripted, site-specific actions to explore the meaning of moments shared between artists, audiences and spaces. Their work examined what it means to be a social being, testing both themselves and audiences. In Street Piece, 1980, they repeatedly crossed Auckland’s Queen Street in daylight, with commuters and passers-by becoming active participants. In contrast, Museum Piece, 1980, performed late at night at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, had no audience and demonstrated how absence itself shapes experience.

Roche and Buis understood the ephemeral nature of performance and embraced documentation as a vital extension of their practice. They produced their own artist books, photographs, recordings and ephemera, while also collaborating with contemporaries to document their performance in other ways. Through the production of archival content, they created records that became a form of interaction. Some performances are richly documented, while others exist only in traces, shaped as much by absence as presence.

Drawing on the Peter Roche and Linda Buis Archive, this display presents photographs, artist books, writings, recordings and diaries from key performances. These materials both reveal and conceal the works, inviting you – a new audience – into an ongoing dialogue of interaction and the continuing legacy of their practice.

The E H McCormick Research Library and Archive is proudly supported by Auckland Art Gallery Foundation.

Image credit: Performance, Auckland City Art Gallery, 9 March 1983, image from catalogue of Exhibition: A Documentation of Six Performances by Roche/Buis RKS Art, Auckland 9–19 August 1983. Peter Roche and Linda Buis Archive, E H McCormick Research Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of Natasha Francois, 2023