BMW Tate Live

What & When

A programme of live and performance art at Tate Modern, London, initiated in 2011 by Cathrine Wood, Senior Curator International Art (Performance). Originally comprising the Performance Room series—the first performance arts programme commissioned solely for the online space—, the partnership (BMW Tate Live) has since evolved to include site-specific performance events and annual live exhibitions of installation, film, music and dance. I was involved as an intern in 2014, working alongside Wood and Assistant Curator Capucine Perrot on the production of projects by Cally Spooner, Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Bojana Cvejić among others; most extensively Spatial Confessions (On the question of instituting the public). 

How & Who

Spatial Confessions (On the question of instituting the public), a four-day programme at Tate Modern in May 2014, examined the question of ‘publicness’ within museum spaces. Orchestrated by performance theorist Bojana Cvejić and realised in collaboration with choreographer Christine De Smedt and Ana Vujanović, among others, it featured live and online performances, talks and films, investigating how people perform in public and how they present themselves as both social citizens and private individuals. By addressing performance as a form of social choreography— how bodies and habits are organised in society—Cvejić explored how politics and social relations play out in human interaction and decision making.

Why

My involvement at Tate was concurrent to pursuing a Masters degree in Curating, in the context of which I was drawn to learn and think critically about the choreography of space, time and bodies within the event of art. Performance is a notion in which movement and immediacy are key. It demonstrates the provisional nature of culture and includes the viewers within the ‘frame’, writes Wood, thus foregrounding the embodied experience of the audience. The Performance Programme at Tate has been an opportunity to “test the elasticity of the museum”, as each project challenges traditional museum practice and “changes institutional behaviour” (Wood, 2018) or simply renders the institution tangible as a composition of bodies in space.