BMW Tate Live: On Mediated Experience: Transforming Performance

How does the power of the digital arena within everyday life complicate our understanding of liveness? What resonances do physical spaces for performance have for online audiences or artists, whose shared space is the online community? How does it change our understanding of documentation, which no longer comes after the event but during it?

An interdisciplinary panel of practitioners, theorists and experts from the fields of performance, digital media and social theory reflect on how liveness and mediation are changing our lives.

Speakers include the internationally recognised artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson, artist Pablo Bronstein, Assistant Curator of Performance at Tate Capucine Perrot, and author of The Language of New Media Lev Manovich. Chaired by co-founder and the Director of the Live Art Development Agency Lois Keidan.

Biographies

Pablo Bronstein

Pablo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentinain 1977 and lives and works in London and Deal, UK. In 2012, Bronstein was the second artist to participate in the BMWTate Live: Performance Room series, premiering Constantinople Kaleidoscope, an entirely new work made especially for the Performance Room. Involving a group of dancers, Bronstein creates a baroque trompe l’oeil stage set that exaggerates the perspective of the room with mirrored columns. Bronstein uses architectural design and drawing to engage with the grandiose and imperial past of the built environment and this preoccupation with form frequently extends into his live work. His solo exhibitions include: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); Sculpture Court, Tate Britain (2010), Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2011); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2013) and REDCAT, LA (2014). Group exhibitions include Manifesta 8, Murcia, (2010–2011), Performa 07, New York (2007); and Tate Triennale, Tate Britain, London (2006).

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson was named one of ‘21 Leaders for the 21st Century’ in 2014 by Women eNews. Her work has been shown in over 200 large-scale exhibitions throughout the world and is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Lehmbruck Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada, Walker Art Center, Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester), and Berkeley Art Museum, in addition to celebrated private collections. First working in drawing and sculpture, Hershman Leeson turned to performance and conceptual art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hershman Leeson’s investigation of identity and various modes of surveillance developed into a variety of works, ranging from Lorna (1983/84), one of the first interactive projects on video disc, to Teknolust (2002), which addressed cyber-identity, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the decoupling of sexuality and human reproduction. A strong feminist voice, Hershman Leeson released the ground-breaking documentary, !Women Art Revolution, distributed by Zeitgeist, in 2011.

Lois Keidan

Lois Keidan is a co-founder and the Director of the Live Art Development Agency. She was Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London from 1992 to 1997 where she devised a year round programme of new performance and initiated numerous new ventures for established and emerging artists. Prior to theICA, she was responsible for national policy and provision for Performance Art and interdisciplinary practices at the Arts Council of Great Britain. She contributes articles on performance to a range of journals and publications and gives talks and presentations on performance at festivals, colleges, venues and conferences in Britain and internationally. She sits on a number of Boards and Advisory Panels, including Artsadmin (London) and Performa (New York). In 1999, she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Dartington College of Arts, and in 2009, she was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Queen Mary, University of London.

Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich is the author of Software Takes Command (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which was described as “the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” Manovich is a Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Software Studies Initiative that works on the analysis and visualization of big cultural data. In 2013 he appeared on the List of 25 People Shaping the Future of Design.

Capucine Perrot

Capucine Perrot has been Assistant Curator for the Performance Programme at Tate Modern since 2010. Her recent projects include Performance Room, a series of live performances conceived for online audiences. She was part of the curatorial team that organised the inaugural programme of The Tanks, Tate Modern’s new spaces dedicated to performance (July – October 2012).