As part of the Hyundai Commission: Tania Bruguera – 10,148,451, Tania Bruguera will be in residency at Tate Exchange for the month of October. Bruguera is also Tate Exchange’s Lead Artist for its 2018-19 activity year, which is inspired by the theme of ‘movement’. Her residency at Tate Exchange addresses not just the physical movement of people, but the emotional journey from the far away and unknown ‘other’ to the close-by neighbour.
Drawing on the ‘Terms and Conditions’ document written by the Tate Neighbours, which can be accessed when logging on to the Tate WiFi network, Our Neighbours asks visitors to Tate Modern to actively engage with the lives of our neighbours and to commit to a neighbourly action wherever they have come from or where they live now.
The programme seeks to revive collective social responsibility and common purpose through deliberation and public commitments.
The programme will activate the Terms and Conditions document in three stages across the Tate Exchange floor:
- Who are you interested in? – Visitors are invited to show support and commitment to one of the groups identified by the Tate Neighbours or to add their own interest.
- Deliberation – Visitors will discuss their ideas for action in this area with Tate Neighbours, Tania and eachother, framed by quotes from Tania.
- Commit – After deliberation, visitors will pledge one or more of the following:
- Voice
- Time
- Knowledge and assets
- Money
- Actions
These activations will be supported by a programme curated by the Tate Neighbours of discussions, mini-lectures and workshops to equip visitors with skills for Neighbourly action.
The first weekend is curated by the Neighbours and Natalie Bell - it includes workshops on campaign building and a reunion of SE1 United graduates.
Bruguera has worked closely with Tate Exchange Associate Counterpoints Arts in the development of the programme. Counterpoints is a leading national organisation in the field of arts, migration and social change with a mission to support and produce the arts by and about migrants and refugees, seeking to ensure that their contributions are recognized and welcomed within British arts, history and culture.
About Tania Bruguera
Best known for her politically-engaged projects and activism, Bruguera makes work that addresses institutional power, borders and migration. She has established a unique concept for her political approach to art – Arte Util (useful art) – one that has continued to be developed during her Hyundai Commission and will continue with Tate Exchange.
Over the past 20 years, Bruguera has become renowned for creating art that addresses major political concerns, often taking the form of a political or social action. Her work questions the nature of power structures, behaviours and values. She has consistently argued for art’s role as a useful agent of real change in the world, while using the museum as an active forum for public debate.
Bruguera’s previous projects have included the Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behaviour Art School), an institution that existed in Havana from 2003 to 2009, and the recently opened Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism in Havana. Her work Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008, which involves two mounted police officers performing crowd-control exercises inside the museum, is one of the major performance works in Tate’s collection. In 2012 Bruguera was also in residence at Tate Modern with her ongoing project Immigrant Movement International, in which visitors were required to line up and pass a lie detector test based on questions from the UK immigration form before being granted access to the Tanks.
