First presented as an installation at Documenta XI in 2002 and subsequently performed at The Kitchen in New York, this multimedia production was performed at Tate Modern by Joan Jonas. In this piece, Jonas, a pioneer of contemporary video, performance and installation-based practices, revisited the myth of Helen of Troy using her emblematic vocabulary of ritualised gestures and symbolic objects mixed with live drawing, video and pre-recorded sound.
New York-based artist Christian Marclay has collected over 1,200 Christmas records from charity shops and used record stores. These form a festive archive which Marclay invited local DJs to remix during a series of live performances at Tate Modern in 2004. A work in progress, this project was initiated in 1999 and now takes place once a year, at Christmas, each time in a different city around the world.
In collaboration with Dance Umbrella. Part of Dance Umbrella 2005, in association with Time Out.
For nearly three decades, Rosemary Butcher has been one of the UK's most consistently radical and innovative choreographers, using cross-arts collaboration within the choreographic process and frequently selecting non-theatrical spaces to present her work. Saturated with ideas of journey and navigation, Images Every 3 Seconds, The Hour and Hidden Voices formed a triptych of solo performance, film and installation that logged a highly personal trajectory of choreographic identity and challenged all conventional expectations of dance. Situated in the unique architectural context of the Turbine Hall Bridge, this work investigated the relationship between dance movement and the image.
Cannibalising images, texts and all manner of cultural detritus from sources as varied as Stanley Kubrick, Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler, Yukio Mishima, the Marquis de Sade and Dr No, Jonathan Meese’s installations and performances are some of the most provocative and dynamic to have emerged in Germany during the past decade. This performance unleashed Meese’s unique and mischievous mythology in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for an unforgettable night of epic and anarchic absurdity.
Regeneration was a newly commissioned collaborative performance and installation by musician Zeena Parkins and artist Daria Martin. Parkins, a New York-based harpist, is well known for her experimental improvisations and compositions, as well as for her collaborations with musicians including Ikue Mori, John Zorn and Björk. Regeneration featured Parkins’s new composition alongside a set piece and slide show created by artist Martin, whose film Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon 2005 was also a collaboration with Parkins. The performance's visual components referred back to the film, remixing and reinventing its fictional world. Martin imagined the slides as a dream-like revelation of fantasy worlds of the athletes depicted in her film, using shape, colour and texture to evoke a night-time atmosphere conjured as they sleep.
Tate Modern’s programme of films, screenings and discussions has expanded dramatically since 2004. Through innovative collaborations with a wide range of institutions including the British Film Institute, LUX, Fondazione Prada, the Venice Film Festival, and the Discovering Latin America Film Festival, the pioneering programme has made links between film and other visual arts, and created a new and unique space for the moving image in London. Between 2004 and 2006, highlights included major seasons of films by the London Film-makers Co-operative, Andy Warhol and Robert Frank, and screenings of work by Bas Jan Ader, General Idea, Joan Jonas, Trinh T Minh-ha, Ulrike Ottinger, Anri Sala, Agnès Varda, TJ Wilcox and Marcel Camus. A selection of classic and contemporary Mexican cinema, a series of free documentaries and a season of recent Mexican films were programmed to complement the Frida Kahlo exhibition, and films by the acclaimed American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman were screened in conjunction with the exhibition Jeff Wall: Photographs 1978–2004. A sold-out screening of very rare butoh films almost never seen outside Japan, which were selected by the artist Catherine Sullivan, was held during her Level 2 Gallery exhibition. The exhibition Henri Rousseau: Jungles in Paris was complemented not only by films by young Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but also by Tate Modern’s first ever family film programme featuring animated films.
