BMW Tate Live: Performance Room – Meiro Koizumi The Birth of Tragedy

A second chance to watch Meiro Koizumi’s performance of The Birth of Tragedy captured live on Thursday, 13 June, 2013 at Tate Modern

Meiro Koizumi’s videos are often based on performances and constructed scenarios where he places characters in awkward situations to focus and enlarge the moment when a situation gets out of control, becomes embarrassing or breaks social rules.

For BMW Tate Live, Meiro Koizumi has adapted his video It’s a Comedy 2012, which straddles a line between comedy and cruelty, for a live online audience. In this work a performer read from the trial judgement of Justice Radhabinod Pal, the only member of the international military tribunal for Japanese war crimes to find all defendants not guilty. During the reading of this chilling text, other performers attempted to distract the reader’s delivery using hand gestures, flowers, food and paper. Filming took place over several hours and was edited to a 20-minute video. For this new online piece The Birth Of Tragedy, Koizumi has chosen The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche and invites five performers to interfere with the reading

Koizumi is best known for video work that combines collage and drawing, often depicting a harmonious everyday-situation that builds gradually in tension to end up out of control. He won the Grand Prize at the 15th Asian Art Biennale in 2012 for his two screen video installation, Theatre Dreams of a Beautiful Afternoon. The video installation begins with passengers in a relaxed mood on a train in Tokyo, someone starts crying, and their sobs get louder and louder until the fellow passengers finally react.

Born in 1976 in Gunma, Japan, Koizumi is an artist based in Yokohama working in video and performance. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1999–2002) and was awarded the Beck’s Futures 2, Student Film and Video Award (2001). Recent and other solo exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), Art Space, Sydney (2011) and the Mori Museum, Tokyo (2009). He has participated in numerous group shows such as Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev (2012), Hara Museum, Tokyo (2011), Liverpool Biennial (2010), Media City Seoul (2010), and Aichi Triennale, Japan (2010).

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+.

The Birth of Tragedy performed by
João Cordeiro
Steven Loader
Paolo Mangiola
Paul Preston Mills
Benjamin Samuels
Alex Walker

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