BMW Tate Live Performance Room: Ragnar Kjartansson “Variation on Meat Joy”. Online on 24 October 2013 at 20:00 GMT.

London. Ragnar Kjartansson combines the corporeal and theatre in a new online performance work, “Variation on Meat Joy”, for BMW Tate Live Performance Room on 24 October. The work draws inspiration from Carolee Schneemann’s ground-breaking performance “Meat Joy” 1964. BMW Tate Live Performance Room is a pioneering strand of live, online performances simultaneously seen by international audiences across world time zones via www.youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive. BMW Tate Live is a four-year partnership between BMW and Tate, which focuses on performance, interdisciplinary art and curating digital space. 

Ragnar Kjartansson will transform the Performance Room into a Rococo dining room where lavishly dressed actors eat steak. Filmed in cinematic style, the period setting and 18th century costumes play with the modernity of an internet performance. Strategically positioned microphones amplify the sound of each performer eating. The audience will hear chewing and swallowing, emphasising the normally neatly veiled animalistic nature of the everyday act of eating. 

Carole Schneemann’s “Meat Joy” 1964,the inspiration for this new work by Kjartansson, was a filmed performance work of eight partially nude figures that dance and play with various substances including red paint and raw meat. Schneeman described the work as a celebration of flesh as material. 

Ragnar Kjartansson (b.1976) draws on the history of film, music, visual culture and literature in his work, which includes video installations, durational performances, drawing and painting. He lives and works in Reykjavík, Iceland and exhibits widely around Europe and the US. He represented Iceland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and in 2013 his work was featured in the Biennale’s Arsenale exhibition, “The Encyclopedic Palace”. 

BMW Tate Live Performance Room:

Ragnar Kjartansson “Variation on Meat Joy”

24 October 2013, 20:00 GMT

Online at www.youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive 

Now in its second year, new commissions for BMW Tate Live 2013 include those online for BMW Tate Live Performance Room and live performances at Tate Modern for BMW Tate Live Performance Events. 

BMW Tate Live is curated by Catherine Wood, Curator, Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate and Capucine Perrot, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.

BMW Tate Live Performance Room

Audiences are invited to enter the online BMW Tate Live Performance Room via www.youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive at 20.00 hrs in the UK and exactly the same moment across time zones on the specified dates - 15.00 hrs on the East Coast of America, 21.00 hrs in mainline Europe and 23.00 hrs in Russia. The global audience is encouraged to chat with other viewers via social media channels during the performance and to put questions to the artist or curator following it using their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ accounts. To get the latest updates follow @TateLive, using #BMWTateLive; Tate Facebook or Tate Google+. 

BMW Tate Live
BMW Tate Live is a four year partnership between BMW and Tate that features innovative live performances and events including live web broadcast, in-gallery performance, seminars and workshops. BMW Tate Live aims to reach an international audience through new forms of art, addressing audiences changing needs, tastes and interests in art. The initiative creates a new space for collaboration and a programme that encompasses performance, film, sound, installation and learning – areas where artists can take greater risks and experiment freely. The programme investigates transformation in all its guises and aims to provoke debate on how art can affect intellectual, social and physical change. More information at www.tate.org.uk/bmwtatelive 

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For over 40 years now, the BMW Group has initiated and engaged in more than 100 cultural partner-ships worldwide. The focus of this long-term commitment to culture is modern and contemporary art, jazz and classical music as well as architecture and design. BMW has worked with artists such as Ger-hard Richter, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Zubin Metha, Daniel Baren-boim and Anna Netrebko and commissioned architects such as Karl Schwanzer, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelb(l)au. In London, BMW in partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra, hosts the BMW LSO Open Air Classics, a yearly live concert free of charge in Trafalgar Square, and supports Frieze Art Fair. The BMW Group takes absolute creative freedom in all the cultural activities it is involved in for granted – as this is just as essential for groundbreaking artistic work as it is for major innovations in a successful business. 

Further information: www.bmwgroup.com/culture and www.bmwgroup.com/culture/overview 

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Jeanette Ward

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