Programme
Permanent Installation, South Terrace: Fujiko Nakaya, London Fog with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani
18.30 South Terrace: Min Tanaka Locus Focus
From 19.00 Tanks foyer and East Tank: Isabel Lewis Kizomba Occasion
19.10, East Tank: CAMP Four-Letter Film
19.30, South Tank: Paul Maheke Mbu
21.00, South Tank: Fred Moten and Wu Tsang Who Touched Me?
22.00, South Tank: Daïchi Saïto Engram of Returning
Night Two of the BMW Tate Live Exhibition begins with dancer and choreographer Min Tanaka’s Locus Focus, an improvisational performance taking place in the open-air setting of Fujiko Nakaya’s London Fog on the South Terrace.
Isabel Lewis hosts the first of two Kizomba Occasions, nights that evolve from the sensory experience offered in the Tanks foyer to Kizomba instruction and dancing accompanied by DJs and vocalists in the East Tank.
CAMP’s Four-Letter Film can be seen during a fifteen-minute period in the East Tank. The film takes the form of an overheard conversation that plays out through text displayed via a large-scale, minimum-bandwidth LED structure.
In the South Tank, London-based artist Paul Maheke presents a new performance in collaboration with Cédric Fauq, combining multi-layered video projection with dance, sound, and live percussion to speculate about embodied histories. The title Mbu means ocean or sea in Lingala, a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and mother tongue of Maheke’s father, whose singing features in the soundtrack. With this performance Maheke approaches the queer Black body as an archive, using its waters as pathways to knowledge and information.
Fred Moten and Wu Tsang present Who Touched Me? a live reading from their recent publication, produced in parallel with their installation in the Transformer galleries.
Filmmaker Daïchi Saïto’s visceral and poetic Engram of Returning presents abstracted visions of natural landscapes rhythmically cut between sequences of black and set to the pulsing sounds of musician/composer Jason Sharp’s saxophone score. Screened in epic 35mm CinemaScope format, the film’s grainy, flickering images offer glimpses of snowy and tropical vistas, overlaid and deeply-coloured, as if extracted from a dream.
About the artists
Min Tanaka (b.1945, Japan)
Min Tanaka is an experimental dancer and choreographer. In 1974 he developed a unique style known as ‘hyper-dance’ which emphasises the psycho-physical unity of the body. He strives to explore the fundamental elements of dance, rather than be confined by the principles of an existing technique. Tanaka’s idiosyncratic solo performances are generally not based on a pre-determined choreography. Instead, they are pure experiments in which he responds to the space’s history, the context of the performance and the audience’s reactions. ‘I dance not in the place; I dance a place’, he has said. In the 1980s, Tanaka secretly infiltrated the former Soviet Union countries to perform as an act of rebellion. In 2006 he began a series of improvisational performances that abandon the stage in favour of ‘every-day life scenes’: parks, streets, seashores, and fields both in Japan and abroad.
Isabel Lewis (b.1981, Dominican Republic)
Since 2009 Isabel Lewis has been investigating the role of artist as host. Her signature Occasions – celebratory and sensory gatherings of things, people, plants, music, and dance – offer an alternative to the sterility and visual dominance of the traditional exhibition format. With the Occasions Lewis creates a more complete, bodily experience for the visitor offering an open situation in which guests may freely enter, exit, and revisit. Exploring modes of connection and attention, Lewis shapes a sensorial experience that responds to the energies of her guests. Her Occasions investigate how the subtle introduction of a word, sound, movement, or scent can shift perception and awaken the importance of being together.
Paul Maheke (b.1985, France)
Paul Maheke is a French artist based in London since 2015. He received an MA in Art Practice from l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2011. Maheke was awarded the South London Gallery Graduate Residency 2015-16. His subsequent exhibition ‘I Lost Track of the Swarm’ was held in the first floor galleries in late spring 2016. Maheke completed a programme of study at Open School East, London, where he pursued a period of research and a series of public conversations entitled ‘Beyond Beyoncé: Use It Like a Bumper!’.
Fred Moten (b.1962, USA) and Wu Tsang (b.1982, USA)
Moten and Tsang began collaborating in 2014 through a long-distance experiment in communication during which they left voicemail messages to each other over a period of two weeks. The results of this experiment in exchange became their first collaborative work Miss Communication and Mr: Re 2014. The ongoing collaboration between Moten and Tsang examines the poetics of intimacy.
Professor Fred Moten is a Los Angeles-based poet and academic whose work explores black studies, performance studies, poetry, and critical theory. He currently works as a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.
Wu Tsang is a filmmaker, artist and performer based in Los Angeles whose work examines queer and trans community and community-practices. Her performances explore the act of representing identity while focusing on subcultures and sites of cultural resistance. Tsang’s films, installations, performances, and sculptures move fluidly between documentary, activism, and fiction.
Daïchi Saïto (b.1970, Japan)
Daïchi Saïto is a filmmaker working principally with the Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm formats. He lives and works in Montreal, where he co-founded Double Negative, a Montreal-based artist filmmaking group dedicated to the exhibition and production of experimental cinema. Saïto’s work explores the relation between the corporeal phenomena of vision and the material nature of the photochemical film, fusing a formal investigation of frame and juxtaposition with sensual and poetic expressions. His films have been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including: International Film Festival Rotterdam; Toronto International Film Festival; New York Film Festival; Austrian Film Museum; Anthology Film Archives; George Eastman Museum; Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art; and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB). His films are in the permanent collections of the Austrian Film Museum, the Slovenian Cinematheque, and the Academy Film Archive.
Gravitational Feel was commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, as part of Corpus, network for performance practice. Corpus is Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius), If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam), KW Insti¬tute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Playground (STUK Kunstencentrum & M-Museum, Leuven) and Tate Modern (London). Corpus is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.