The Tanks: Fifteen Weeks of Art in Action – September
Until 28 October 2012
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom
15 Weeks of Art in Action, the opening programme of the new Tanks at Tate Modern, continues in September with the performance series and symposium Performance Year Zero plus a presentation of Haegue Yang’s mobile sculptures, a major installation and performance devoted to the work of filmmaker Jeff Keen, and Boris Charmatz’s experimental exploration of Merce Cunningham’s choreography plus Moments. A History of Performances in 10 Acts.
Haegue Yang: Dress Vehicles
11–16 September 2012
Free
Berlin-based Korean artist Haegue Yang’s mobile sculptures, Dress Vehicles, will be displayed in the Tanks. The wheeled structures are formed from domestic clothes horses and blinds, animated with moving lights and sound. They are given titles like Bulky Lacoste Birdy and are inspired by Oskar Schlemmer’s seminal Triadisches Ballet (1922). Yang will also work with a number of performers to choreograph their own movements in the space, creating a relationship between the person and object as they ‘dance’ together. These movements will be staged at various times throughout the week long installation. Yang (b.1971) works with everyday materials, often domestic ones, to create colourful installations that often combine industrial materials with sensory effects using light and scent. She has also created a number of different performance and video works.
Jeff Keen
18–23 September 2012
Free
Jeff Keen (1923–2012) was one of Britain’s most unique cultural voices, a Brighton-based pioneer in experimental film who transformed art and cinema through a vivid sensibility fuelled by surrealism, comics and B-movies. Keen’s work is a powerful evocation of the violence, colour, speed and noise of the 20th century. His rapid-fire animations, multiple screen projections and raucous performances redefined multimedia art in the UK. This installation of projected films, slides and drawings, conceived by Keen in response to the unique nature of the Tanks space, will be accompanied by a live performance and projection event on Friday 21 September at 20h.
Moments. A History of Performance in 10 Acts
25 and 26 September 2012
Free
Moments. A History of Performance in 10 Acts, was initiated by Boris Charmatz, Sigrid Gareis, Georg Schöllhammer within a display designed by Johannes Porsch at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2012. The project addressed major performances by leading figures in performance art such as Sanja Ivekovic, Graciela Carnevale and Lynn Hershman Leeson as a living archive offering possibilities for new works, through workshops, rehearsals and presentations. Tate Modern presents a new fragment of this project in the Tanks.
Boris Charmatz: Flip Book
27–29 September 2012: Free daytime open rehearsals with live interpretation by Valda Setterfield.
Ticketed performance on 28 & 29 September 2012 at 20h, concessions available.
Choreographer and dancer Boris Charmatz (b.1973) explores contemporary movement and its complex histories. Taking David Vaughan’s 1997 book Fifty Years, which charts Merce Cunningham’s choreography over 50 years, Charmatz invited different groups of dancers—from ex-members of Cunningham’s company to amateur practitioners—to learn and perform Vaughan’s images as a speeded-up version of Cunningham’s language.
Performance Year Zero
30 September–6 October 2012
Some events are ticketed, please click here for information on how to book and the full programme.
Exploring performance history’s enactment as an emerging living tradition, Performance Year Zero is a week long programme of live performance with a two-day symposium. The events confront the present through re-tellings of the past.
Addressing the statement of the leading American feminist scholar Peggy Phelan that ‘performance is the art of the present tense’; Performance Year Zero asks how the museum might start to recount the story of the genre’s now extensive history. Inherent within such re-telling is the shift from the original forms of performance, screening, action, or event to a secondary form: documentation. But artists have increasingly found new ways to reclaim such history from the archive through its active interpretation as new live work. With contributions from Nina Beier, Keren Cytter, Anthea Hamilton, and Rabih Mroué and Hito Stereyl.
Performance Year Zero: A Living History, a two day symposium including screenings, talks, performance and discussion, explores how histories of action and event-based works have created a vocabulary passed between generations of artists that is distinct from the citation of references or sampling in much contemporary art. Speakers will discuss how such recourse to art historical precedents enables a collapse of past and present into a rich new set of possibilities, but leaves the question of ‘authenticity’ unresolved. The symposium will also address how this kind of work also puts pressure on the existing formats of the museum in terms of its temporal and spatial modes of collection and display. With contributions from Barbara Clausen, Guillaume Désanges, Rike Frank, Martin Hargreaves, Irwin, RoseLee Goldberg, David Graeber, Joachim Koester, Franck Lebovici, Kathy Noble, Yvonne Rainer, Jalal Toufic and Catherine Wood.
Discover the full programme on the Tate website.
