9 October 2015
Tate Modern announces a new season of performances commissioned and conceived using online space as its primary medium as part of BMW Tate Live 2015: Performance Room. This original programme is commissioned exclusively for web broadcast, reaching online audiences across the globe. The latest artists invited to participate in this pioneering artistic programme are Mary Reid Kelley, Otobong Nkanga, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and legendary video and performance artist Michael Smith.
Taking place every Thursday across four weeks from 19 November to 10 December 2015, each artist is invited to spend a week working in the space at Tate Modern, before presenting their performance to camera. This will be streamed live across the world on Tate’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/tate) and Tate’s website (www.tate.org.uk/performance-room). Audiences are invited to join in the conversation with others during the performance and to pose questions to the artist and curator afterwards in a live Q+A via Twitter and Facebook using the hashtag #performanceroom.
BMW Tate Live 2015: Performance Room Programme
Mary Reid Kelley
19 November 2015, 20.00 GMT
Mary Reid Kelley presents a new work inspired by Thomas Hood’s 1844 poem TheBridge of Sighs in which the narrator laments the apparent suicide of a young woman, whose body he pulls from the Thames. This Is Offal traverses in tragicomic form the most serious and persistent of human disasters: suicide. In the performance, a pathologist uncovers and examines the body of a woman, whose own organs speak their confusion, discontent, and misunderstanding of her suicide in a riotous wordplay-filled dialogue. Reid Kelley combines painting, performance, and her distinctive poetry in polemical and stylized videos. Made in collaboration with her partner, Patrick Kelley, her videos have been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, the ICA Boston, the Neuer Kunstverein Wien, and SITE Santa Fe. She is the recipient of the 2011 Rome Prize, the 2013 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. Reid Kelley lives and works in upstate New York.
Otobong Nkanga
26 November 2015, 20.00 GMT
Otobong Nkanga’s new performance is an examination of acts of framing. Exploring the process of live editing, the artist’s body, sliding screens, slithers of text and the camera are devices that both cut the frame and create unlikely connections. Nkanga’s multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, photography, installation, video and performance, and focuses on the interrelation between environment, architecture and history. Recent shows and performances include Comot Your Eyes Make I Borrow You Mine, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2015), Bruises and Lustre, M HKA, Antwerp (2015), Glimmer Fragments – Symposium ‘Landing and confessions’, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014), Sharjah Biennial 11, United Arab Emirates, (2013) and Across the Board: Politics of Representation, a 2012 presentation of Contained Measures in The Tanks at Tate Modern for which the artist invited the visitor to engage in a performance about the shifting states of situations and objects. Nkanga was born in Nigeria and lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium.
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
3 December 2015, 20.00 GMT
Using theatre, drawing, literature and sculpture, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s work conjures live and sculptural representations that explore themes of loss, identity and displacement. For this new commission he further explores The Guatemalan civil war (1960–96), a recurring subject in his work, which although often softened by an absurd and humorous approach, fails to conceal the force of history that precedes it. Ramírez-Figueroa has participated in various solo and group exhibitions including Rendez-Vous at the 13th Lyon Biennale (2015), A Chronicle of Interventions at Tate Modern (2014), Burning Down the House, the 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Franklin Furnace award and an Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship, and recently won the 2015 ARCO Region of Madrid Award for Young Artists. He lives and works in Guatemala City. This project is in collaboration with Gasworks, London where Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa will have a solo exhibition from 26 November 2015 – 7 February 2016.
Michael Smith
10 December 2015, 20.00 GMT
Michael Smith is a video, performance and installation artist known for his eponymous personae, Mike, the hopeful innocent who continually falls victim to trends outside his grasp, and Baby Ikki, the melancholic toddler who is distracted by anything in his line of vision. Smith’s Performance Room project tackles the timeworn theme of aging and youth. Smith presents his new video Excuse me!?!…I’m looking for the ‘Fountain of Youth’, interrupted by live appearances of Mike wandering in and out of various scenes around the water cooler during his final days at the office. Smith’s impressive exhibition history since the mid-70s includes the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum, New York and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Recent solo performances and presentations include Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, MoMA, New York, Glasgow International, Greene Naftali in New York, Hales Gallery in London, Dan Gunn in Berlin, and Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam. Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Austin, Texas. Smith will have a screening of his work, spanning over 30 years, at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium on Friday 11 December, 19.00 – 21.00, and a solo-presentation of his work at South London Gallery, London, from 10 to 12 December 2015.
BMW Tate Live 2015: Performance Room presents an innovative format which offers global audiences the chance to experience art in the gallery. The programme asks artists to develop work especially for online viewing, conceived in response to this unique mode of presentation. Since the first Performance Room in 2012, 15 brand new online commissions have been created. This year’s four performances will join this online archive.
BMW Tate Live is curated by Catherine Wood, Senior Curator, International Art (Performance), and Capucine Perrot, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.
For press information or to embed the livestream on a website contact Daisy.Taylor@tate.org.uk or call +44(0)20 7887 8730. For high-resolution images visit tate.org.uk/press
Notes to editors
BMW Tate Live
BMW Tate Live is a long-term partnership between BMW and Tate that features innovative live performances and events including live web broadcast, in-gallery performance, seminars and workshops. BMW Tate Live aims to reach an international audience through new forms of art, addressing audiences’ changing needs, tastes and interests in art. The initiative creates a new space for collaboration and a programme that encompasses performance, film, sound, installation and learning – areas where artists can take greater risks and experiment freely. The programme investigates transformation in all its guises and aims to provoke debate on how art can affect intellectual, social and physical change. For more information, please visit tate.org.uk/bmwtatelive
BMW’s Cultural Commitment
For over 40 years now, the BMW Group has initiated and engaged in more than 100 cultural partnerships worldwide. The focus of this long-term commitment to culture is modern and contemporary art, jazz and classical music as well as architecture and design. BMW has worked with artists such as Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Zubin Metha, Daniel Barenboim and Anna Netrebko and commissioned architects such as Karl Schwanzer, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelbau. In London, BMW in partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra, hosts the BMW LSO Open Air Classics, a yearly live concert free of charge in Trafalgar Square, and supports Frieze Art Fair. The BMW Group takes absolute creative freedom in all the cultural activities it is involved in for granted – as this is just as essential for groundbreaking artistic work as it is for major innovations in a successful business. bmwgroup.com/culture and bmwgroup.com/culture/overview