Confrontational and jarring, the artists at once built up notions of the beauty of the body and tore them down on Friday during the third weekend in Grace Exhibition Space‘s month-long “Climate Change” series, featuring performance artists from all over the world as part of the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival. Friday’s lineup, including Ron Athey, Congelada de Uva, W Christiawan, and Peter Dobill, was as well curated as the previous two weeks at Grace (Action Poetry and La Poncha Nostra). The performers took their marginalized bodies and used their own pain and suffering as tools to create beauty, to shock, and to deify the flesh in all its forms. The perpetual dance of hiding and exposing the self through art became literal, visceral, and bloody that night at Grace Space.

The show opened with Peter Dobill’s piece, which introduced the themes that would be explored throughout the evening; namely, the pain, endurance, and beauty of the human body made strange. Dobill and his assistant stood in a corral-stage, surrounded by hay and papier-mâché body parts. The montrous masks made them appear almost inhuman — more like animals or aliens. The assistant rhythmically whipped Dobill, while he pulled a pin across his skin, creating long, fine cuts across his chest.

The performance was frightening and difficult to watch, yet, like all the performances that followed, you couldn’t look away. The audience stood mesmerized, constantly tilting and peering to get a better view. The music, the sight of self-mutilation, and the what-must-have-been-over-a-hundred-degree heat in the crowded, un-airconditioned space, combined to create an otherworldly sensory spectacle. It was almost as if these alien figures in a post-apocalyptic farmyard setting were trying to communicate something of vital importance in a language of gesture that we could feel but not quite comprehend.