BMW Tate Live: Performance Room – Joan Jonas Draw Without Looking

A second chance to watch Joan Jonas’s performance of Draw Without Looking captured live Thursday, 28 February, 2013 at Tate Modern

Joan Jonas, one of the most significant artists in the history of video and performance art, opens the BMW Tate Live Performance Room 2013 series with a new work created especially for an online audience.

The global online audience are encouraged to chat with other viewers via social media channels during the performance and to put questions to the artist or curator for the live Q&A following, using their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ accounts. The latest updates will be available by following @Tate_Live, using #BMWTateLive; Tate Facebook; or Tate Google+.

Since the 1960s, Jonas has transcended genres to develop influential work rooted in space, movement, ritual and gesture. Jonas pioneered the use of film and video in performance, and later began to incorporate fairy-tales and folklore, turning away from the camera toward a more painterly, narrative and text-based practice. She has always combined traditional and new media in her work. Jonas’s Performance Room will coincide with her work The Juniper Tree, Jonas’s first UK performance at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1979, and now part of Tate’s collection, being on display as part of Tate Modern’s A Bigger Splash exhibition.

Jonas’s new work for the BMW Tate Live Performance Room is unveiled as it happens, live and online. Jonas, using her own teaching notes as source material, has devised and recorded a set of instructions in the form of a poem. These simple instructions - ‘draw for an audience’, ‘fold paper’, ‘make a mask’ and others – are performed spontaneously by the artist in the Performance Room. She has access to simple props – shapes, sticks, paper, woodblocks, bells, drawing materials – and performs against a backdrop of abstract video and music.

Audiences are invited to enter the online BMW Tate Live Performance Room via www.youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive at 20.00 in the UK and exactly the same moment across time zones on the specified dates:
15.00 on the East Coast of America
21.00 in mainland Europe
23.00 in Russia.

During the performance you are encouraged to chat with other viewers from around the world via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and to ask the artist or curator questions which will be answered at the end of the performance during the live Q&A. You can access the latest updates @TateLive using #BMWTateLive, Tate Facebook or Tate Google+.

Draw Without Looking performed by
Joan Jonas

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