Friday 2 September 2005, 20.00

Programme duration 90'

Once described as 'the spawn of Cindy Sherman and Buster Keaton', Alex Bag makes irreverent, smart and fiercely critical video and installation work. She is best known for her low-tech performance tapes that utilise the power of the televised image and the satiric edge of stand-up comedy to cheerfully, but mercilessly, denounce a range of modern-day maladies. From the frivolities of our celebrity-infatuated culture to the futility of the whole fine-art enterprise, nothing escapes the fury of this unflagging art-world renegade. An iconic figure of the New York art scene since the mid 1990s, Bag is acclaimed as one of the foremost American artists yet her work has rarely been exhibited in the UK.

The host of this Select event, artist Phil Collins, is a long-time fan of her work and the American lo-fi scene, and has selected videos from 1995 through to the present. Collins and Bag will introduce the screening.

'This is a living-dead art, a critical-hysterical acting out of the deodorized-bathroom neurotic, the suicidal biochemical-test subject and the terminal media addict we all recognise as ourselves.'
– John Kelsey, Artforum, May 2004

Tate Britain  Auditorium
Free, no bookings taken
Seated on a first-come, first-served basis