BMW Tate Live: Performance Room: Nicoline van Harskamp "English Forecasts". Online on 19 September 2013 at 20:00 GMT.

Note: This press release is a 1:1 copy of the original issued by BMW headquarters in Germany. No adaptations have been made to cater for the UK market.

London. Nicoline van Harskamp explores the variation and future of spoken English in “English Forecast”, a new online work for the BMW Tate Live Performance Room on 19 September. BMW Tate Live Performance Room is a pioneering strand of live, online performances simultaneously seen by international audiences across world time zones at youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive. BMW Tate Live is a long-term partnership between BMW and Tate, which focuses on performance, interdisciplinary art and curating digital space.  

With English as one of the world’s most commonly used cross-border languages, a myriad of dialects and new forms of communication are heavily influencing daily language, sentence formation and pronunciation. For “English Forecast”, Nicoline van Harskamp has researched what the possible future sound and nature of spoken English might be. A team of actors, with different mother tongues, will perform this language, and online audiences are invited to participate by repeating what they hear. Their task involves use of the full range of consonants and vowels of the International Phonetic Alphabet - a notation system for the totality of sounds that can be made by speech. 

Nicoline van Harskamp lives and works in Amsterdam where she is a head lecturer at the Sandberg Fine Arts Institute. Her previous projects include “Yours in Solidarity” which addressed the very recent history of anarchism through a correspondence archive, and was presented in different stages of completion in Mexico City, Frankfurt, Genk, London, Shanghai, Zagreb and Brussels. Nicoline van Harskamp has staged her live pieces at Witte de With, Rotterdam; New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Arnolfini, Bristol; Serralves Foundation, Porto; and Kaaitheater, Brussels. In 2009, she won the Dutch national prize for contemporary art, Prix de Rome.  

BMW Tate Live: Performance Room: Nicoline van Harskamp

19 September 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. 

About BMW’s Cultural Commitment

For more than 40 years now, the BMW Group has initiated and engaged in over 100 cultural cooperations worldwide. The company places the main focus of its long-term commitment on modern and contemporary art, jazz and classical music as well as architecture and design. In 1972, three large-scale paintings were created by the artist Gerhard Richter specifically for the foyer of the BMW Group's Munich headquarters. Since then, artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Olafur Eliasson, Jeff Koons, Zubin Metha, Daniel Barenboim and Anna Netrebko have co-operated with BMW. The company has also commissioned famous architects such as Karl Schwanzer, Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelb(l)au to design important corporate buildings and plants. In 2011, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a global initiative of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum and the BMW Group celebrated its world premiere in New York. 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  

The BMW Group

The BMW Group is the leading premium manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles in the world with its BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce brands. As a global company, the BMW Group operates 28 production and assembly facilities in 13 countries and has a global sales network in more than 140 countries. 

In 2012, the BMW Group sold about 1.85 million cars and more than 117,000 motorcycles worldwide. The profit before tax for the financial year 2012 was euro 7.82 billion on revenues amounting to euro 76.85 billion. At 31 December 2012, the BMW Group had a workforce of 105,876 employees. 

The success of the BMW Group has always been built on long-term thinking and responsible action. The company has therefore established ecological and social sustainability throughout the value chain, comprehensive product responsibility and a clear commitment to conserving resources as an integral part of its strategy. As a result of its efforts, the BMW Group has been ranked industry leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes for the last eight years. 

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For questions please contact:

Dr. Thomas Girst

BMW Group Corporate and Governmental Affairs

Head of Cultural Engagement

Telephone: +49 89-382-24753, Fax: +49 89-382-10881

Jeanette Ward

Senior Press Officer, Tate

Telephone: +44 (0)20 7887 4942, E-mail: pressoffice@tate.org.uk

Media Website: www.press.bmwgroup.com

E-mail: presse@bmw.de