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This is a past display. Go to current displays
Ana Lupas The Solemn Process 1964-2008 (1964-74/76; 1980-5; 1985-2008) © Ana Lupas

Ana Lupas The Solemn Process 1964–2008 Oli Cowling © Tate Photography Tate 2016

Ana Lupas

Walk into Ana Lupas’s exploration and preservation of the communal act of making 

Ana Lupas’s The Solemn Process 1964–2008 began as a traditional ritual involving communal craft work in rural Romania. When this activity fell into decline, Lupas found a new way of continuing the work.

Beginning in 1964, Ana Lupas oversaw the creation of large straw structures in villages in Transylvania. She enlisted the help of villagers who used weaving techniques traditionally employed to make wreaths for harvest festivals. Lupas originally saw the artwork as the communal act of making and displaying these objects in the local area.

Lupas defined her role as ‘a bridge between the ancestral and the future’. Individual structures might change and decay, but the artwork remained as long as the process continued over time and the activity expanded out to involve new participants. The project developed in this way, but by the mid-1970s, the economic and social changes in Romania made it difficult for participants to continue.

Lupas could no longer ensure that new objects would be made each year. This changed the status of the structures from products of an ongoing process to relics. Lupas tried different ways to preserve them, first by restoring the original wreaths, then by drawing them, making more than 200 drawings. Eventually, in the early 2000s, she developed the technique of sealing them in metal ‘tins’. This solution satisfied the artist as a practical means of preservation and a way of combining the natural and traditional ‘wreaths of wheat’ with modern, industrial associations through the metal casing.

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Tate Modern
Blavatnik Building Level 3

Getting Here

1 February 2022 – 21 April 2024

Free

Monster Chetwynd, A Tax Haven Run By Women  2010–1

A Tax Haven Run By Women is an installation of sculptures and costumes made by Chetwynd that she uses for live performances. These imagine an anarchic game-show style competition between two teams, ‘Women Who Refuse to Grow Old Gracefully’, inspired by the actor and singer Mae West, and ‘The Oppressed Purée’. The teams compete via a dance-off for a ride to a tax haven (a place with very low tax for foreign investors). They travel in the Catbus, a character from Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film My Neighbour Totoro (1988). Meanwhile, other performers act as a male cult leader, and seals, controlling the soundtrack. Chetwynd’s performances and costumes are absurd, irreverent and spontaneous. However, her work often stems from research into economics, anthropology and maverick individuals. A Tax Haven Run By Women reflects on the similarity between cults and tax havens. Both tend to exist in remote locations isolated from regular society. Chetwynd says, ‘The performance is weirdly a combination of goofy, dreamlike Mae West women running a tax haven which is this wonderful place where you do actually want to be, and the kind of scary arsehole cult leader gone wrong.’

Gallery label, April 2025

1/1
artworks in Ana Lupas

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T14827: A Tax Haven Run By Women
Monster Chetwynd A Tax Haven Run By Women 2010–1
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