Outset Germany_Switzerland was pleased to have supported the BMW Tate Live Exhibition ‘Sex‘ by Anne Imhof at Tate Modern, London, and to have donated a work of the exhibition to the public collection of an institution.
On the 21st March 2019 Tate Modern unveiled a new large-scale commission by Anne Imhof. The dynamic installation combined structural interventions, painting, sound and lighting, unfolding over ten days with six nights of durational performance. Following ‘Faust‘ (2017), Imhof’s intense and engaging work which was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, ‘Sex‘ was the first project by a solo artist to occupy the full suite of spaces in Tate Modern’s atmospheric Tanks. This was the third annual BMW Tate Live Exhibition, part of Tate Modern’s performance programme in partnership with BMW, between 2016 and 2020.
The commission was both an exhibition by day and a series of six live performances by night. Titled ‘Sex‘, the work dealt with fluidity between binaries – female and male, top and bottom, night and day – and the blurred line where two opposing zones meet. Structural interventions spliced through each of the grand spaces. In the South Tank, visitors walked into the space on a raised platform, a scenario mirrored in the East Tank where the hierarchy of viewing was reversed and visitors were situated on the ground beneath a pier. The adjacent Transformer galleries displayed a collection of Imhof’s Gradient and Scratch paintings, alongside elements of sculpture that intervene in the architecture.
Since 2012, Imhof has worked with a core group of collaborators from diverse backgrounds to make her durational performances. During six remarkable evenings at Tate Modern, they inhabited the space while interacting with each other and engaging with situations and objects that serve as settings for their characters. Imhof didn’t appear in the work herself but was present, orchestrating the work and sending notes and directions to her collaborators. Power dynamics between performer and viewer were also a key component of the work. Viewing positions alternated between high and low, shifting perspectives on the live tableaux. Performers also occupied an inaccessible zone behind a glass partition in the East Tank, onto which they painted. Music specially composed together with Billy Bultheel and Eliza Douglas for the unique acoustics of the subterranean galleries bled through each space. Although the structure and score of the live work were carefully developed by Imhof, what happened within the four-hour duration was dependent on the individuality and agency of the performers, making each staging unique and unrepeatable.
Anne Imhof (b. 1978) lives and works in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She represented Germany at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation, and has won the Absolut Art Award (2017) and the Preis der Nationalgalerie (2015). Imhof’s performances have been staged in solo exhibitions at major international venues including the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, La Biennale de Montréal, Kunsthalle Basel (all 2016), MoMA PS1, New York (2015), the Carré d’Art – musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes (2014) and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2013). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015), the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015) and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2014).
BMW Tate Live was a major international partnership between BMW and Tate, which foregrounded the pivotal role of live experimentation in art history and today. The programme has featured over 55 artists including both emerging and more familiar figures from across the world. It began in 2012 with the world’s first performance programme created for live online broadcast and later evolved into an ongoing series of public performances in and around Tate Modern. As performance took on an ever greater role in Tate Modern’s vision for the museum, the first annual BMW Tate Live Exhibition was opened in the Tanks in 2017. The last iteration of this series of innovative live performances happened in 2020.
Graeme Grieve, Chief Executive Officer, BMW Group UK and Ireland, said:
“Through our partnership with Tate Modern, BMW Tate Live has developed into an innovative exhibition format which attracts the world’s leading performance artists to London. We are delighted that Anne Imhof will perform her exciting programme in the Tanks space next March and look forward to another successful exhibition.“
Faust (Eliza) (2017) by Anne Imhof was gifted to the MMK Frankfurt as part of the Tate Live Exhibition ‘Sex’ by Anne Imhof.
Click here to read more about the project.
