Tate Modern
27 March – 30 March 2003
Live Culture is a programme of Live Art performances, presentations and an international symposium at Tate Modern. Bringing together distinguished artists, curators and commentators Live Culture will consider the cultural value of ‘live’ practices within the visual arts and broader cultural arenas. Contributors will include Franko B, Forced Entertainment, RoseLee Goldberg, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Yu Yeon Kim, Oleg Kulik, Peggy Phelan, Hayley Newman, and La Ribot.
Live Culture: A programme of Live Art will take place from 27 30 March in the Turbine Hall and Level 4 Galleries. Presentations will include Ex-Centris (A Living Diorama of Fetish-ized Others) by the eminent US/Mexican artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and a team of international collaborators. Award-winning Spanish artist La Ribot will present, for the first time, the complete series of Distinguidas Pieces. Russia’s most celebrated performance artist, Oleg Kulik, will mark his London debut with Armadillo for Your Show. Franko B will present his acclaimed ‘catwalk’ performance I Miss You! on the Turbine Hall ramp and Forced Entertainment will take audiences beyond ‘theatre performance’ with two durational works, 12am: Awake and Looking Down and Quizoola! Hayley Newman’s famed fictitious photographs Connotations - Performance Images 1994-98 will be displayed in Level 4 Galleries.
The symposium Live Culture: Performance and the Contemporary, will take place on 29 and 30 March in the Starr Auditorium and consider the political power and social effect of Live Art and its relation to cultural change.
To place the live work in context, there will be a selection of performance-based screenings and personal overviews by leading figures including RoseLee Goldberg, author of Performance Art, from Futurism to the Present, and Yu Yeon Kim, curator of Translated Acts. Live Culture will be followed by a major publication, Live: Art Performance and the Contemporary edited by Adrian Heathfield and produced in collaboration with Tate Publishing.
A resurgence of interest in experiential and performative practices within the visual arts means that Live Culture is a timely and critical intervention into current debates. Live Culture is not a survey show, but a framework to appraise key shifts in performance art over the last few decades: its spread out of the gallery and into other spaces and forms; its increasingly hybrid nature and disruption of global and cultural borders; its use of risk and extremity in confronting the art and politics of the body; its impact on social activism and political intervention; its interface with the digital world; and its role as a site for expressions of new identities beyond the old distinctions of ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Live Culture sets out to highlight the ways in which the term Live Art has come to represent a broad array of contemporary practices that employ performance as a generative force to destroy pretence, break apart traditions of representation, and open different kinds of engagement with meaning.
Live Culture is curated by Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine, of the Live Art Development Agency, and Adrian Heathfield who lectures in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick and is a leading performance academic and writer. Live Culture is produced by the Live Art Development Agency, the leading development organisation for Live Art in Britain, and is supported by the Arts Council of England, London Arts, the Felix Trust for Art and the Henry Moore Foundation.