Space devoted to live art
Mark BROWN
Gallery says two former oil tanks will be filled with performances
and debates, starting this summer.
Dropping into Tate Modern’s new underground oil tank spaces this
summer might mean seeing a performance of minimalist dance, taking part
in a debate on what it is to be an immigrant or experiencing work by an
artist who most recently filmed naked men playing five-a-side football.
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Nicholas Serota in the Tate Modern. He
called the Tanks ‘incredible spaces’. Picture by Richard
Saker |
The gallery has revealed details of the Tanks, described as the
world’s first museum space dedicated permanently to live art,
installation and performance. They will open on 18 July, 10 days before
the Olympics, and be filled this summer and autumn with a 15-week
festival of art.
Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, called the Tanks “incredible
spaces” and said the festival was “a very exciting moment for Tate”.
While the gallery had always been an enthusiastic collector and
exhibitor of installation and live art, the Tanks offered something new,
he said. “The public wishes to engage with these works in a very
different way from simply going in to a gallery and observing the work
on the floor or a wall.
“The Tanks are the first spaces dedicated permanently to live art,
installation and performance in any museum building anywhere in the
world.”
The new spaces are three 30-metre-wide concrete oil tanks
decommissioned more than 30 years ago. One will be used as back-of-house
while the other two will permanently show live art, performance, film
and installation as well as hosting symposiums and conferences. The East
Tank will be taken over this summer by a single new work by a Korean
artist, Sung Hwan Kim, who will tell a story using drawing and writing
as well as music, video, sound and sculpture.
Work in the South Tank will be “constantly changing, constantly
evolving, constantly shifting. Any time you come down you might see
something completely different from what you saw the previous day, or
the previous week,” said the curator of film, Stuart Comer. The first
project will feature the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
adapting an important and seminal minimalist dance work she first
performed in 1982 called Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve
Reich, consisting of three duets and one solo.
Another artist in the South Tank will be the young British artist
Eddie Peake who this year showed a film of men playing football naked.
Comer said: “He is very interested in aspects of voyeurism and
sexuality, in particular the male body. He will be developing a new
project for this space responding to those interests and to the space
itself.”
What the new work will be is still in development but curators said
it would feature men and yes, they could even be naked.
The Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, who mounted an exercise in crowd
control using two mounted police officers at Tate Modern in 2008,
returns for a three-week residency in which she will run workshops and
stage discussions around her ongoing art project called Immigrant
Movement International.
In total, more than 40 established and emerging artists will take
part in the festival, including the British artist Tina Keane, the US
choreographer Yvonne Rainer and the Korean artist Haegue Yang, who had
his first big UK exhibition last year at Modern Art Oxford.
There will also be a concrete space called the Transformer Galleries
showing installations of recent major acquisitions such as two works
which Tate said were emblematic of the direction it was taking.
- The Guardian
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