The Tanks

Taus Makhacheva, Tightrope  2015

Tightrope 2015 is a colour video with ambient sound lasting fifty-eight minutes and ten seconds. The video is shown as a large-scale projection and exists in an edition of five with one artist’s proof; Tate’s copy is number four in the edition. Other copies from the edition are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and the Van Abbemusem, Eindhoven jointly with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp. The work originally existed as a seventy-three-minute piece and was transformed into the current edit in 2017, in preparation for its display at the Venice Biennale in 2017. The artist has linked Tightrope conceptually to a slightly later work titled On the Benefits of Pyramids in Cultural Education, Strengthening of National Consciousness, and the Formation of Moral and Ethical Guideposts 2015, a performance staged during the 6th Moscow Biennale and the Kiev Biennial in 2015.