BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights

The first BMW Tate Live Exhibition marks a new departure in how Tate Modern presents an exhibition: from a static arrangement of works, to an experience of art that unfolds through time. Situated throughout the full suite of the Tanks galleries, and on the new South Landscape, BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights combines installation, performance, film, video, sound, and talks over a period of two weeks.

BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights brings together an intergenerational selection of artists whose work considers questions of encounters, environments and habitats, and—often re-imagining the rituals of museum display—extends a form of hospitality to other artists and visitors alike. The artists in the exhibition create images of networks and forms of participation that link the natural environment with social media; organic and technological, human and non-human.

Four newly commissioned works by Fujiko Nakaya, Isabel Lewis, CAMP, and Fred Moten and Wu Tsang exist as both free daytime installations and spring-boards for six unmissable evenings of ticketed live performances. In contrast to the white cube gallery spaces used for traditional exhibitions in the museum, the artists will make use of the alternative atmosphere of the Tanks providing visitors with a distinctive location in which to engage with new art in a new way. BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights will weave together experiences of viewing, socialising, learning and participating that traditionally have had separate statuses in the museum’s value system. Participating artists include Melanie Bonajo, Carlos Casas, Ian Cheng, Ligia Lewis, Paul Maheke, Phill Niblock, Emily Roysdon, Daïchi Saïto, Lorenzo Senni, Pepa Ubera and Josefina Camus, and Ian Wilson.

Isabel Lewis (b.1981, Dominican Republic) will be in residence in the Tanks Lobby throughout the duration of the live exhibition. She will host a number of her signature occasions, combining music, food, drink and perfume to create an alternative environment for dance, discussions and her invited musicians. Through the introduction of organic plant life and a chorus of dancers into the subterranean Tanks, Lewis will offer an alternative to the sterility and visual dominance of the traditional exhibition format. Exploring modes of connection and attention, Lewis will shape a sensorial experience that responds to the energies of her guests and serves as a literal, and conceptual, entry point into the exhibition.

CAMP, a collaborative studio founded in Mumbai in 2007, will use the Transformer Galleries as a space to share a selection of rarely-seen installations from the past 15 years that rework everyday circuits of electricity. Wu Tsang (b.1982, USA) and Fred Moten (b.1962, USA), will present Gravitational Feel, a sculptural performance using fabric and sound to explore the social and physical significance of touch and voice. Installations by Carlos Casas, Phill Niblock, and Lorenzo Senni will exist as site-specific environments open to the public by day preceding or following live performances by night.

BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights will extend outside to the new South Terrace animating the landscape outside the Switch House for the first time. Fujiko Nakaya (b.1933, Japan), who first came to prominence through her collaboration with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) in the 1970s will transform the Terrace with an immersive fog sculpture. This installation will be animated each day by a light and soundscape made in collaboration with Nakaya’s historic collaborators: Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani; and host performances by renowned dancer and choreographer Min Tanaka.

In different ways, all the artists in the exhibition create communities or stage shared experiences linking natural, organic environments with new technologies and networks.

BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights is curated by Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of International Art (Performance) and Andrea Lissoni, Senior Curator of International Art (Film) with Isabella Maidment, Assistant Curator, Performance and Carly Whitefield, Assistant Curator, Film. Produced by Judith Bowdler, Production Manager. 

In partnership with BMW.