FROM FIRE TO FIRE: JOSEF KA’S BIRTHDAY PERFORMANCE AT THE GALERIE HORS CHAMPS, PARIS
Every year Josef Ka celebrates her birthday in different galeries all around the planet. September 20th, 2026, this annual event took place in the center of Paris at the Galerie Hors Champs which is near the Centre Pompidou. The program included three videos and two live performances. The vidéos were – Josef Ka plays in the Labyrinth (2023), Ascension (2024), and the world premier of From Fire to Fire (2026) feat. Gérard Pape.
The center and heart of Josef Ka’s birthday celebration 2026 were the two live performances in collaboration with avant-garde composer, Gérard Pape, who played Hurdy Gurdy.
The first part of the event was a ceremony where members of the public were invited to exchange a shot of Finnish vodka and share a kiss on the lips.
This live performance ended with Josef Ka’s climbing up on a pedestal. She became a kind of living statue. She started to blow up condoms which exploded…
On this pedestal, we literally didn’t know if she will fall or not, but miraculously she kept her balance until she leapt into the void where she was received into the hands of the musician who transformed his musical support into bodily support as they left the gallery together and went into the darkness of the night.
After a short break, started the second performance KA-LLIGRAPHY #11.
Josef Ka stripped naked, symbolically going a step farther into her intimate communion with her public. Music of Hurdy Gurdy now reached a new level of intensity as part of the ritual.
Josef Ka poured both black and red paint onto herself and what followed was at once a frenetic dance and a way to create a fantastical live painting which bore the traces of the dance itself.
The canvas remains as a relic of the body’s effort to combine bacchanalian dance and action painting. The body itself is a painting and also creates a second painting as it slips and slides across the gallery itself as well as rubs sensually the soft skin of the canvas.
The artist was making love with the canvas and the public had the privilège of witnessing an extraordinary event: the communion of artistic création and love itself as the prime mover of all human existence.
Josef Ka as performance artist is a création. She herself is a work of art that lives, moves and loves through her performance actions. She is the embodiment of the Nietzschian OverMan. Beyond the sick human animal, the human being, Josef Ka needs no words to show us that beyond the human, there is another being that is possible.
That being celebrates Life and Love, Existence and Création, that one makes an Art that needs no words because it operates on the level of the Real of the body, a body that overcomes suffering by célébrating the ecstasy of living to the fullest with courage, conviction and generosity.
The public witnesses a miracle that leaves it in a state of exhiliration and amazement. All limits are overcome, but not for the sake of transgression. Josef Ka is an Overcoming of the human that is Beyond Good and Evil.
September 25th, 2026
Photos by Samuel Macé @samuelvisio
Photos/Videos by the French Photographer : Precious Forever 83
@preciousforever83
KA-LLIGRAPHY #11 image by Josef Ka
