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13/3/2008

Here We Dance

Tate Modern, London

Here We Dance looks at the relationship between the body and the state, exploring how the physical presence and circulation of bodies in public space informs our perceptions of identity, nation, society and democracy. The title derives from a work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, which refers to the balls that took place during the French Revolution, and alludes to the importance of social gathering in any form of political action or resistance.

Bodily movements and gestures, collective actions and games are examined through media as diverse as film, photography, neon text and performance. Each work presents the viewer with the residue of a past event, be it personal memory, cultural tradition, or a moment of historical or political significance. Here We Dance includes work by Johanna Billing, Katinka Bock, Yael Davids, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gail Pickering and the choreographer Yvonne Rainer, whose performances are documented in photographs by Peter Moore.

Text by Ann Coxon and Vanessa Desclaux .

The Level 2 Gallery programme has been made possible with the generous support of Catherine Petitgas.

Johanna Billing
(b 1973, Sweden)

Project for a Revolution (2000) and Missing Out (2001) each show a group of young people invited by Billing to participate in staged activities choreographed by the artist. Ambiguous and elusive, Billing's films are made with an acute awareness of the changing society in which these actions take place. The gathering of young people apparently waiting passively for something to happen in Project for a Revolution was inspired by a fervent meeting of student activists in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1969), while the group activity depicted in Missing Out draws on the artist’s memories of taking part in breathing exercises at school in the 1970s. Both films are intended to be shown on a loop, and are projected in the gallery in such a way as to implicate the viewer in the more or less open activities depicted on screen.

Katinka Bock
(b 1976, Germany)

Katinka Bock reveals the historical and political charge that can be found in movements and materials, using a range of different media such as sculpture, site-specific installation and film. At the entrance of the gallery, Sol d’incertitude (2006) is composed of paving slabs taken from the streets of Paris and covered by the artist in tar. Their different sizes correspond to different historical periods, and this uneven surface becomes a metaphor for the recent political and social history of France. For PS: Jerusalem(2003), Bock has choreographed adults playing a game of musical chairs. This black and white and silent film, shot on Super 8 in the streets of Berlin, suggests found footage from a more remote past. The title refers to the German name for the game: ‘A Journey to Jerusalem’.

Yael Davids
(b 1968, Israel)

‘The work exists for a moment. Afterwards, what is left is a void, an absence, an object that ‘has been’’, Yael Davids has said. End on Mouth in absentia (2007) is an installation that brings together drawings, photography, texts and scores relating to her performance End on Mouth (2004). In the performance, she investigates the nature of theatre by proposing a different articulation of its constitutive elements, such as audience, stage, voice, text and choreographed gestures. Avoiding any direct representation of the live event, the installation instead gathers evidence and residue that allow us to imagine the performance that took place or the one that will happen next and, more importantly, deals with the emptiness that follows the lived moment. The work explores ideas of theatre as both an architectural space and a communal experience, yet also shows an awareness of the very different context of an art gallery, with individual visitors rather than an audience.

Ian Hamilton Finlay
(1925 – 2006, Bahamas)

The Scottish poet and sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay approached words as a visual medium, carving them on stone, placing them alongside images or using them to create neon sculptures. He was fascinated by the slogans and rhetoric of the French Revolution. Ici on Danse (1996) can be translated as ‘here we dance’ or ‘here people dance’. These words were displayed at the entrance to a festival that was held on the site of the Bastille in July 1790 to celebrate the anniversary of the storming of the infamous prison. It can therefore be seen as a defiant statement of the revolutionary spirit. The accompanying text was by Camille Desmoulins, a journalist and politician who became one of the leaders of the revolution before he himself was arrested and executed in 1794.

Gail Pickering

Gail Pickering’s sculptural tableaux vivants, films and performances explore and revive social and political events by staging fictional actions in real sites or ephemerally built theatrical sets. Zulu (Speaking in Radical Tongues) (2005/2008) is a sculpture that is activated by an evolving series of performances throughout the exhibition. The three-dimensional letters of ‘Zulu’ resemble a discarded advertising hoarding or props from a film set. During the performances, ‘Zulu’ both as sign and stage, is hijacked by a performer channelling dialogue and physical gestures borrowed from the diaries and manifestos of 1960s/70s urban guerrilla groups, communes and their cinematic counterparts. Presented as a seamless monologue, the script undergoes a process of repetition and restructuring with each performance, interrupted by the performer’s choreographed movements. The scripts and props are displayed as remnants of the performance throughout the exhibition, inviting the audience to reflect on the portrayal of these ideologies and events through historical distance.

Yvonne Rainer
(b 1934, USA)

Yvonne Rainer is a choreographer and filmmaker. In the 1960s she was a leading figure of the Judson Dance Theater, a group of artists and dancers based in Greenwich Village, New York. Rainer developed a form of choreography incorporating repetitive movement and everyday props, thereby emptying the experience of theatricality or drama. The photographs included in this exhibition show two of Rainer’s best known pieces. The dancers in Parts of Some Sextets (1965) carried out a series of actions involving rope and mattresses. WAR (1970) was performed at New York University at the height of the Vietnam War and was described by Rainer as ‘a huge, sprawling non-competitive game-like piece for 31 people… derived from terms of military tactics found in the Iliad, The Peloponnesian War and various accounts of the Chinese revolution and Vietnam War.’


Image: Katinka Bock, Le Sol d incertitude II, 2007
Tar, Parisian cobble-stone, 14 square metres
Exhibition view : Volumes en extension, Centre d art Passerelle, Brest
Photo: Sebastien Durand

Tate Modern
Bankside - London

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