Regeneration: Tate Modern Turbine Hall

By Hazel Last edited 216 months ago
Regeneration: Tate Modern Turbine Hall
Regeneration Tate Live.jpg

The Turbine Hall in Tate Modern is, to put it mildly, bloody huge. It's... enormous. And sometimes filled with polystyrene sugar cubes, strange weather or the mutterings of millions. However, a space like that has rarely seen live performance which makes sense if you've been there - it would be a bit like shouting Shakespeare into the upturned wok formerly known as the Millennium Dome.

"Collaborative performance and installations" do, on the other hand, have a home here. This Sunday night, Tate Modern will premiere artist Daria Martin's film Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon - a timely piece considering the other preoccupations artists are currently experiencing regarding the encroaching Olympics. Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon

"examines twentieth-century avant-garde ideals via an arcane Olympic sport, the modern pentathlon, an anachronistic, but still surviving event comprised of running, swimming, shooting, horseback riding and fencing. Tensions between aspiration and exhaustion, between forward-looking modernity and romanticism and between artifice and expression are heightened and unravelled in this many-layered film"

Following this screening, the Turbine Hall will host a newly commissioned piece by Daria Martin and New York-based contemporary harpist Zeena Parkins (previously collaborated with Bjork) called Regeneration


"Regeneration features Parkins’s new composition, alongside a set piece and slide show created by artist Martin, whose film Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon (2005) is also a collaboration with Parkins. The performance's visual components refer back to the film, remixing and reinventing its fictional world, investigating its dark underbelly and delving into the world of the night."

It's a kind of avant-garde, contemporary art two-for-one offer, only available in the modern art branch of the Tate public art gallery mega-chainstore.

Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon will be screened at 7.00pm at the Starr Auditorium, followed by Regeneration in the Turbine Hall at 9.00pm. Both events are free, no bookings necessary. Picture: Daria Martin, Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon 2005, © courtesy of the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

Last Updated 31 March 2006