BMW Tate Live: Charles Atlas and Johanna Constantine with Helm

Tate Modern presents a collaboration between Charles Atlas and New York-based performance artist Johanna Constantine with live video editing and projection and live electronic music by Helm (a.k.a. Luke Younger).

Johanna Constantine

Johanna Constantine is a dance based performance artist. She was a founding member of the Blacklips performance group in New York City's East Village around 1992. She continues to collaborate with co-founder Antony Hegarty in both video and live performance. She and Charles Atlas met in the early 90s and have engaged in many projects together, most recently a live performance at the Whitney Museum Biennial in 2012. She is also featured in the film Turning. She performs stark, monolithic dance pieces utilising metal, paint and body extensions. She has performed in numerous museums as well as touring as a member of the Johnsons. Her dark yet powerfully hopeful visions have led to several performances with Butoh artist Yoshito Ohno, the last being at Antony's Meltdown in South Bank Centre, London (2012).

Luke Younger

Luke Younger is a sound artist and experimental musician based in London, who works with a vast array of revolving instrumentation and abstract sound sources. Younger's compositions build a dense aural landscape which touches on aspects of musique concrete, uncomfortable sound poetry, industrial, and hallucinatory drones.

To this date, he has produced three full length albums; debut To An End, self released on his own ALTER imprint in 2010, was a complex network of intricate layers and mixed sounds, described by John Elliott (Emeralds / Spectrum Spools) as 'a haunting composition of field recordings, tape loops, percussion, and electronics (among other things), creating an extremely tense and daunting audio tapestry which leaves the listener pondering the intense meaning of the sounds chosen'.

His third album, Impossible Symmetry (2012), is the first to be informed by live performance. Recorded over a year in London with some technical assistance from John Hannon (Liberez), most of the compositions were created out of improvisations that were conceived in a live context and then turned into finished works in the studio. Whilst being an electronic record primarily, it contained acoustic sound sources used in a similar methodology to the second album Cryptography, and incorporated a more extensive use of electronic elements with moments of rhythmic dark ambience recalling early Coil and Cabaret Voltaire to Traversable Wormhole's industrial minimalism. Younger creates a world where his instruments morph into spectral rust, a shimmering klang swims alongside passive noise and the relationship between acoustic and electronic derived sounds forms a solid foundation.

Please note this performance is standing only

BMW Tate Live is curated by Catherine Wood, Curator, Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate and Capucine Perrot, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.