Tate announces BMW Tate Live 2014 programme

15 January 2014

Tate announces BMW Tate Live 2014 programme

Tate announced the BMW Tate Live 2014 performance programme today. Now in its third year, BMW Tate Live is a major four-year partnership between BMW and Tate, which focuses on performance and interdisciplinary art in the gallery and online.

Bojana Cvejić, Tim Etchells, Joëlle Tuerlinkx and Cally Spooner are among the artists commissioned to contribute this year. From a carnival procession through the Turbine Hall to inanimate objects being brought to life in the Starr Auditorium, the BMW Tate Live programme continues to explore the diverse ways in which artists approach live performance in the 21st century whether in the gallery or online. Throughout the programme, artists will collaborate across dance, film and other art forms.

Performance Events: free and ticketed performances at Tate Britain and Tate Modern
Performance Room: a pioneering programme of live performances commissioned exclusively for online viewing and simultaneously seen by international audiences across world time zones. During Performance Room online viewers are encouraged to chat with each other via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and to ask the artist or curator questions. These will be answered at the end of the performance during a live Q&A; and Talks: a series of four public events that complement and inform the performance programme

BMW Tate Live 2014: Performance Room and Performance Events

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Cally Spooner And You Were Wonderful, On Stage
Performance Event, Tate Britain, Rotunda
Tuesday 21 January, 19.00 & 21.00 (sold out), £8 / concessions available
Performance Room, online at tate.org.uk/bmwtatelive or youtube.com/tate/bmwtatelive
Thursday 27 February at 20.00&GMT

British artist Cally Spooner will present the first BMW Tate Live commission of 2014. And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, is a two-part commission that will be performed at Tate Britain on 21 January and online on 27 February. The work draws on the genre of Broadway musicals and has been written for a chorus line singing a cappella. For the first part of the commission at Tate Britain, the chorus line will gossip about current affairs and fallen heroes in exchanges about well-known media events from the worlds of politics, pop music and sport. Specifically they will focus on occasions when fake or controlled performances have been presented as live and authentic. Beyoncé’s lip-synching at Obama’s inauguration and Oprah Winfrey’s live interview with Lance Armstrong are among several high profile news stories described as the chorus line move from an improvised style to a robotic libretto of corporate and PR buzzwords. The work references the studies of French philosopher Bernard Steigler which considered how time and technology impact on our daily lives and explores the development of speech and language.

And You Were Wonderful, On Stage was commissioned by and developed in collaboration with: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Performa 13, New York; and Tate Modern, London. Cally Spooner is a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists 2013.

Tim Etchells and FormContent It’s moving from I to It – The Play
Performance Event, Tate Modern, Level 2, Room 10: Realisms
Thursday 30 January, 19.00 & 20.30 (sold out), £8 / concessions available

British artist Tim Etchells has collaborated with FormContent to present It’s moving from I to It – The Play, the second BMW Tate Live performance of 2014, on 30 January at Tate Modern. Written and directed by Etchells, the work playfully explores the relationship between language and objects in the context of an art gallery.

For this production, Etchells drew upon texts, visual material and performance, to explore issues of authorship, language, and institutional rhetoric. The play, performed by two actors within a gallery at Tate Modern, references the context in which it is set through allusions to ways that art is made and viewed. Etchells references minimalist deconstructive theatre throughout the piece, which is a recurring stylistic theme in his work.

It’s moving from I to It – The Play was commissioned by London-based curatorial initiative FromContent as part of a the two-year project, It’s moving from I to It, that invited a range of artists to respond to concepts of fiction and narratives in curating an exhibition.

Etchells is an artist, published author and artistic director of Forced Entertainment, a globally-renowned experimental theatre company founded in 1984 that has produced acclaimed performances all over the world such as Let the Water Run its Course (to the Sea That Made the Promise) 1986; Quizola 1996; and The Coming Storm 2012. He has collaborated with artists such as Elmgreen & Dragset and exhibited widely in Europe including at Manifesta 7 in 2008. This performance is co-commissioned by the curatorial initiative FormContent, and produced as part of Corpus, new collaborative network for commissioning performance-related work co-founded by If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, Playground (STUK & M), Leuven and Tate Modern, London with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Joëlle Tuerlinckx
Performance Event, Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium
Friday 4 and Saturday 5 April, £8 /concessions available

Joëlle Tuerlinckx will present a new work in which she activates the inanimate technical objects in Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium. Using the core elements of the space such as the screen, projector, sound system, blinds and lighting Tuerlinckx creates a performance set to a musical score that maps the room, revealing its structure, composition and details so that the audience looks at and experiences the space differently. This piece extends her exploration of the relationship between space, drawing and sculpture seen in her exhibition-based work. Tuerlinckx has exhibited internationally, including a travelling retrospective covering twenty years of her career that toured to Wiels, Brussels, Haus der Kunst, Munich and Arnolfini, Bristol (2013). She has also exhibited at the Reina Sofia, Palacio de Cristal, Madrid (2009); MAMCO, Geneva, (2007); The Drawing Center, New York, (2006); South London Gallery (2002); and dOCUMENTA 11, Kassel (2002).

Commissioned and produced as part of Corpus, new collaborative network for commissioning performance-related work co-founded by If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, Playground (STUK & M), Leuven and Tate Modern, London with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Bojana Cvejić and Collaborators Spatial Confessions
Performance Event, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
Wednesday 21 – Saturday 24 May, Free admission
Performance Room, online at tate.org.uk/bmwtatelive or youtube.com/tate/bmwtatelive
Thursday 22 May at 20.00 GMT

Bojana Cvejić’s work examines political and social issues through the theory of performance and fluctuates between the genres of lecture, biography and live performance. For this commission, Cvejić collaborates with Christine De Smedt, Ana Vujanović, Marta Popivoda and Lennart Laberenz to devise choreographic patterns that will elaborate upon and interfere with the natural flow of visitors walking through the unique public arena of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The new piece is based on Cvejić’s recent publication Public Sphere by Performance, co-written with Ana Vujanovic (2012), which is a study of how ‘a public’ is formed and impeded by contemporary politics. Cvejić’s has organised independent platforms for performance art across Europe including TkH Centar, Walking Theory Centre in Belgrade; PAF, performingARTSforum in St Erme, France; and most recently 6MONTHS1LOCATION, CCN in Montpellier.

Up Hill Down Hall – An indoor Carnival
Performance Event, Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
Saturday 23 August 2014, Free admission

Up Hill Down Hall – An indoor Carnival is a contemporary art procession that recreates London’s Notting Hill carnival costumed parade with works by artists who draw inspiration from carnival as an artistic medium. This new commission brings the sensorial experience of Oscar Niemeyer’s Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro, where the Rio Carnival takes place, to the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. This day-long performance combines the techniques of display from Brazilian and Caribbean carnival traditions with the style of London’s Notting Hill Carnival. Informed by the history of the annual London event, this project reflects the shifting significance of carnival from ritual of resistance and festival of diversity to multimedia performance art form.

Up Hill Down Hall was conceived by Claire Tancons in discussion with Tate Modern’s curatorial team and in collaboration with the artists in the project including Marlon Griffith and Hew Locke and architectural designer Gia Wolff among others, along with the Notting Hill Carnival ;community. Claire Tancons is a curator, writer and scholar based in New Orleans whose work focuses on carnival, public ceremonial culture and popular movements. She is currently co-curating the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award winning project En Mas: Carnival 21st Century Style for CAC New Orleans.

Selma and Sofiane Ouissi
Performance Room, online at tate.org.uk/bmwtatelive or youtube.com/tate/bmwtatelive Thursday 18 September at 20.00 BST

Selma and Sofiane Ouissi perform a new work that explores the use of the internet in daily life. The Performance Room format corresponds with the way in which Selma and Sofiane Ouissi have been working together for many years. Selma lives in Paris and Sofiane in Tunis. The internet is therefore vital to the production of their collaborative works.

The brother and sister duo are major figures of contemporary dance in the Arab world and have collaborated with directors and choreographers such as Fadhel Jaziri, Hichem Rostom, Martino Müller, and the Compagnie Michèle Anne de Mey. They have performed in numerous shows worldwide and at live art festivals including Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Tanzquartier in Vienna, Danse in Aix, Bouffes du Nord in Paris, and Festival de Carthage.

Alexandra Bachzetsis From A to B via C
Performance Room, online at tate.org.uk/bmwtatelive or youtube.com/tate/bmwtatelive
Thursday 23 October at 20.00 BST

Alexandra Bachzetsis’s new work From A to B via C explores the use of gesture and movement across popular cultural and the arts, such as romantic comedy, TV soap or hip-hop video versus ballet, modern dance and performance.

Alexandra Bachzetsis is a Zurich based artist and choreographer. She began her career as a dancer and has been working independently, producing and presenting her own work in theatres and contemporary art venues since 2003. In 2008 she took part in the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art and had a major solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel. In 2012 she won the Swiss Performance Prize. Her work Etude was included in dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel in 2012 and her newest performance The Stages of Staging was presented at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2013. From A to B via C is commissioned by and developed in collaboration with Tate Modern, London and Biennial of Moving Images, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva.