fri 23/05/2025

Tate Modern

Imagine: Ai Weiwei - Without Fear or Favour, BBC One

If you found yourself thinking that you were watching Mission: Impossible rather than Imagine, you could have been forgiven. Alan Yentob had clearly been banned from meeting Ai Weiwei in China, and so one of their interviews was conducted over a...

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Trisha Brown Dance Company, Tate Modern & Queen Elizabeth Hall

A snaky conga of women in white pantsuits snuggling their loins together in a Spanish dance, and wiggling their way along a wall behind a Joseph Beuys installation may well be one of the indelible sights of my dance year. Mine, and that of only a...

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The Genius of British Art, Howard Jacobson, Channel 4

Howard Jacobson, fresh from his Booker Prize triumph, was on an admirable mission last night: to rescue the good name of the Victorians. He wanted us to stop caricaturing our 19th-century forebears as prudish, self-righteous, pompous and...

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When will it end? Dust continues to spoil fun for visitors to Tate Modern

Ai Weiwei in his field of porcelain sunflower seeds. The seed, says the artist, symbolises the Chinese people

Three days after its closure, and just a few days after opening, Tate Modern is still to make an announcement over the future of Ai Weiwei's interactive Turbine Hall installation. Will the closure of the dust-emitting artwork be permanent? Or are...

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Gauguin: Maker of Myth, Tate Modern

'Self-portrait with Manao tu papau' by Paul Gauguin

Gauguin has always been the poor relation in the art-legend sweepstakes. Unlike Van Gogh, there is no heartwarming story of overcoming lack of technical facility; no ghoulishly enjoyable story of genius crushed by madness. Instead, there is a...

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Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, Tate Modern

In 1994, Francis Alÿs joined the regular hiring-line in the central square in Mexico City. Standing next to plumbers and carpenters with their hand-lettered signs touting their skills, his sign read "Turista", as he offered his ability to be an...

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Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, Tate Modern

From Nan Goldin's series 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency': definitions start dissolving because of her presence as voyeur and participant

In the week that Sarah Ferguson was caught on a secret camera receiving a stash of $40,000 from News of the World journalists, Tate Modern launched this ambitious and excitingly diverse photography exhibition. Had the meeting been earlier, the...

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Tate Modern celebrates independents

There'll be art, film, music and performance in a weekend of organised mayhem

Since its millennium opening, Tate Modern has managed to transform the landscape for the contemporary visual arts in Britain. This week it celebrates its 10th anniversary by inviting 70 of the world’s most innovative, independent art spaces to take...

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Jannis Kounellis, Ambika P3

Jannis Kounellis: 'The sculpture looms above the visitors dodging in and out of blind alleys'

Last year, visitors to Tate Modern’s Artists’ Rooms could see a room dedicated to Jannis Kounellis. It was filled with some of his most resonant work: a door filled up with drystone walling; burlap sacks of grain, rice, pulses; metal bells. For a...

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Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, Tate Modern

Arshile Gorky found it almost impossible to finish a painting. Something would always call him back. So he would go back and would add and retouch and tinker around over several years - sometimes over the course of a decade or two. “When something...

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Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, Tate Modern

Modernist art movements are a lot like totalitarian regimes. They produce their declaratory manifestos, send forth their declamatory edicts, and, before you know it, a Year Zero mentality prevails: the past must be declared null and void. Seeking to...

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Art 2010: Looking Ahead

Van Gogh's 'Hospital at Saint Rémy', 1889: 'the first major Van Gogh exhibition in London for 40 years could break all attendance records'

2010 begins with a worldbeating blockbuster capable of breaking all attendance records – and it ends with another. It’s more than 40 years since Britain saw a major exhibition of the work of Vincent van Gogh; 40 years in which the tormented Dutch...

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