Check out the new promo video for Tate à Tate. And if you haven’t taken the tour yet, download for free at www.tateatate.org
Tate à Tate – new video
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Category Archives: Platform
UK DfID implicated in money-laundering investigation
Our friends at Corner House and Jubilee Debt Campaign have monitored how the UK government has given aid money to corrupt private equity firms in Nigeria. Below is the press release. It’s long, but well worth reading if you want understand how Western aid policy can undermine development.
Campaigners slam Government’s development approach as DfID-backed private equity fund comes under criminal investigation in Nigeria Continue reading
Shell oil spills reach new peak; Nigeria hit hard
From Milieu Defensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands):
Amsterdam – Shell has released its 2011 Sustainability Report. The figures reveal that the number of leaks (208 worldwide) has risen for the first time since 2003: globally, Shell has leaked a total of 6.7 million litres of oil. That is the second highest peak this millennium. Nigeria remains the most seriously affected, where last year the number of leaks due to poor maintenance doubled, from 32 to 64. This means that the oil concern has sunk back to its 2002 level there.
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Damien Hirst appropriated our work!
The new Damien Hirst retrospective which opens tomorrow 4th April at Tate Modern has forced a last minute revision of our BP themed alternative audio tour. The Hirst exhibition appropriated the floor sp
This forced us into a last minute revision of the work before the launch – necessitating the selection of a new work, writing a new section of the guide, re-recording our trusty narrator Josephine Borradaile, creating new sound design, re-editng, remastering and re-uploading the work. Our unauthorised audio tour Drilling The Dirt (A Temporary Difficulty) was successfully installed in the Tate Modern on Friday 23rd March. It is part of a series of three works critical of Tate’s complicity in BP’s social and environmental crimes through its acceptance of BP sponsorship. We have archived the Ai Weiwei section here for your enjoyment and edification.
This post was written by Phil England, who co-created one part of the Tate à Tate audio tour. You can follow Phil on @ClimateRadio
Listening in with Tate à Tate
Dr Andrew Filmer, Lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance at Aberystwyth University reports back on his experience with the Tate à Tate audio tour.
What I love about audio tours – such as Lavinia Greenlaw’s recent Audio Obscura, or Platform’s And While London Burns – is the way they help me sidestep the sensory overload of everyday life and put me in another place where I can see and hear more clearly, drawing my attention to aspects of the world that are vitally important but which usually go unnoticed. Now, perhaps BP’s sponsorship of Tate (along with the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Opera House, etc.) doesn’t exactly go unnoticed, but it’s the unthinking acceptance of this sponsorship that the creators of Tate à Tate’s three audio tours seek to disrupt. And, at their best, these works provide a subversive re-scripting of the Tate galleries and the ferry journey between them. By mapping out a web of associations between BP’s dubious corporate record, the galleries, and the art works they house, these tours profoundly question the wisdom of Tate’s current relationship with BP.
Keeping on: sustainable art-activism
What enables artists and activists to keep on making work that challenges the status quo?
How can we sustain ourselves, our imaginations, and our communities while keeping on speaking truth to power?
On 14 March 2012, I wrote this to some people I have been working with recently:
“I’m giving a presentation called “Keeping on: sustainable art-activism” next Wednesday at the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester on how creative activists sustain themselves, methods to keep on going over time…The talk will look at Platform’s work and some of the strategies and lessons learnt over the years from artists, social movement activists and others.
I had an idea to ask you what your own seasoned tricks of the trade are? Secrets of outlasting, keeping creative, of not going under or giving in, or selling out.
11,000 Nigerians sue Shell in London courts
From Leigh Day & Co:
Six months after Shell admitted liability following two massive oil spills in the Niger Delta, law firm Leigh Day & Co are serving formal legal proceedings tomorrow (Friday 23 March 2012) on the oil giant in the High Court in London for compensation on behalf of over 11,000 Nigerians after negotiations broke down last week.
Shell to pay $25m to Nigerian communities over oil spill
From UPI.com:
Shell Petroleum Development Co. was ordered by a Nigerian court to pay more than $25 million to five communities in Imo state for a 1997 oil spill. The communities sued Shell for compensation for immediate direct losses to their means of livelihood caused by the oil spill, The Guardian in Oshodi, Nigeria, reported Tuesday.
Tate Soundscape Hijacked by Artists
BP’s environmental record is appalling yet many people are prepared to turn a blind eye to the fact that Tate is in bed with BP, one of the “ten worst corporations’’ based on its environmental and human rights record.
A new series of artworks questioning Tate’s relationship with BP has been commissioned by three activist organisations Platform, Art Not Oil and Liberate Tate. The launch is on Friday the 23rd of March 2012 in London UK at 6.30pm at the Calder Bookshop Theatre, SE1 8LF within walking distance of Tate Modern.
Social Licence: Complicity in the Age of Extraction
Tar sands protest at Tate Modern in 2011
At first glance, there might not seem to be an obvious common ground between indigenous activists in Canada, performance artists in the UK and climate activists in both countries. However, the international controversy over Canada’s tar sands industry in northern Alberta has galvanised individuals from all these communities into new cooperative relationships opposing the developments. Over the last few years, environmental groups and artists have influenced each other’s practices, resulting in innovative, cross-platform public interventions.
This article, by Kevin Smith of Platform and Clayton Thomas Muller of the Indigenous Environmental Network first appeared in the Winter 2011/12 issue of Fuse Magazine in Canada.