The workshop has become a ubiquitous cultural form within art institutions, used by curators, artists and pedagogues to create opportunities for audiences to do everything from acquiring creative skills to enacting social change. Yet, despite its growing popularity, there is surprisingly little published research exploring the use of the workshop within discourses of curating art and performance. In this article we explore the significance of this turn to the workshop as a special kind of meeting within the art institution. We consider what work the workshop is doing within the context of the art institution and what cultural value systems it shifts, or fails to shift, that have been historically prioritized within those spaces. What does this form of meeting, which promises to be more productive, more open, more useful than an ordinary gathering or talking shop, invoke and bring with it? To answer this question, we draw on Judith Butler’s notion of performativity and Sara Ahmed’s reworking of this notion through the idea of institutional non-performativity, to explore further how the workshop promises, limits and demands forms of action that exceed the mere representation of issues within the art institution. Focusing on an example that both exemplified the trend for art institutions using the workshop as the idealized and politicized performance of public engagement and exceeded the boundaries of sanctioned co-production and performance, ‘Disobedience Makes History: Exploring creative resistance at the boundaries between art and life’ by The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination at Tate Modern in 2010, we argue that the workshop levies a promise for action that, even when non-performatively circumscribed, can lead to performative performance.