19.30, Sunday 27 May – 15.00, Monday 28 May 2007

The event runs all night but ticket holders can drop in and out. Food and drink will be available during the night. Feel free to bring a sleeping bag.

Advance ticket holders may arrive at any point.

To mark the twentieth anniversary of his death in 1987, Andy Warhol’s (1928–87) first ever film, Sleep 1963, is screened throughout the night, accompanied by the legendary musical performance that inspired it. The five and a half-hour film will be looped to provide over eighteen hours of continuous viewing, and is a meditative study of the poet John Giorno asleep in his apartment. Warhol was inspired to complete the film with a new repetitive editing structure after attending the writer and composer John Cage’s (1912–92) historic 1963 performance at the Pocket Theatre in New York of the French composer Erik Satie’s (1866–1925) epic repetitive work for piano, Vexations, 1893. This transfixing event at Tate Modern brings together two artistic landmarks from a momentous year, and will be a contemplation on stillness, repetition, time and death.

Cage was the first to stage a complete performance of Satie’s highly idiosyncratic work for solo piano, a 52-beat segment accompanied by the instructions that it be played ‘very softly and slowly’ 840 times. The piece was performed by ten relaying pianists each of whom played twenty minutes or fifteen repetitions of the segment at a time. The performance lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Andy Warhol claimed he attended the whole performance and that same year, decided on a new structure for Sleep based on the repetition of footage.

The performers at Tate will include renowned new-music specialists including the composers Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman, alongside the composer and scholar Joshua Rifkin, who participated in the performance in 1963, the acclaimed new music pianist Tania Chen, and some of the brightest young pianists in London.

This landmark event is introduced by a special performance by John Giorno, the subject of the film, and accompanied by a panel discussion about the relationships between Warhol, Cage and Satie.

Concept by Lauren A Wright, developed in collaboration with Tate Modern

In collaboration with the London Consortium

Tate Modern  Turbine Hall
£18, booking required
£25 combined booking with daytime panel discussion.