PAWA 2023 Website & Visual Identity for a New Zealand Performance Art Festival

A digital home for an evolving performance art festival

Studio Intrepid has collaborated with PAWA since 2018, supporting the festival as its programme, archive and community have continued to grow. By 2023, the website needed to do significantly more than promote an upcoming festival. It needed to function as a living platform for PAWA: presenting a complex programme across multiple locations, connecting audiences with artists and venues, publishing critical writing, preserving previous festivals and supporting the organisation’s ongoing funding and archival requirements. The project became both a visual redesign and a broader rethink of how PAWA’s growing collection of events, artists, writing and documentation could work together online.

Creating an identity that felt closer to the work

PAWA wanted to distinguish itself from the more polished and commercial visual language often associated with arts festivals. Performance art can be political, personal, confrontational, experimental or difficult to categorise. The website therefore needed to feel connected to the work itself rather than packaging it within a conventional festival aesthetic. The redesigned site uses a predominantly dark interface, oversized typography and restrained colour alongside large-scale performance photography. Images are given a central role throughout the experience, using the unusual, physical and sometimes ambiguous nature of performance art to create curiosity before a visitor necessarily understands what they are looking at. That sense of discovery became an important part of PAWA’s visual identity: contemporary and considered, but still connected to the energy of an independent art scene.

Building a flexible festival programme

One of the main challenges was presenting a programme that included events across different cities, towns and venues, with varying dates, times and ticketing requirements. Rather than treating each event as a standard page, I developed a structured event system within WordPress. Each event could store relevant programme information such as date, time, venue, participating artists and booking details, allowing the website to display and filter this information consistently throughout the festival. Paid and free events could exist within the same programme, while Humanitix booking was integrated directly into the website so visitors could move from discovering an event to securing a ticket without breaking the browsing experience. This gave PAWA a system that could be reused for future festivals rather than rebuilding the programme structure each year.

Connecting events, artists, venues and writing

The website was designed around relationships rather than isolated pages. Artists have their own profiles. Events connect to the artists appearing in them. Venues connect to the events being hosted there. Journal articles can reference relevant artists, while festival archives bring the programme, documentation and participants from each year together. That interconnected structure makes it easier for visitors to move through PAWA in different ways. Someone might discover an artist through an event, continue into their profile, find writing about their work and then explore their involvement in an earlier festival. Behind the interface, this required a custom content structure connecting events, artists, venues, journal entries and festival archives throughout the site.

Designed around performance photography

Photography became one of the strongest connective elements across the project. Rather than relying heavily on decorative graphics, the identity uses documentation from performances themselves. The images are unpredictable, sometimes strange and often difficult to understand without context—which is exactly what makes them effective. Used at large scale, they invite the viewer to investigate the work rather than explaining everything immediately. That sense of curiosity supports PAWA’s broader role as a platform for challenging ideas, experimentation and cultural exchange through performance.

A platform built to continue evolving

The 2023 project gave PAWA a much stronger foundation for both its annual festivals and its activity between them. The redesigned website brought the festival programme, ticketing, artist profiles, venues, journal and historical archives into one connected system, while the new visual direction gave PAWA a more distinctive identity that reflected the experimental nature of the work it presents. Rather than creating a website solely for a single festival campaign, the project established a platform that could continue to grow alongside PAWA’s programme, artists and archive.