Once seen as an obscure and elusive genre, performance art has been gaining public awareness over the past decade. But it still lacks a permanent presence in a museum setting, historically because of its anti-institutional nature and recently because of its time-based and spontaneous tendencies. This summer Tate Modern opens The Tanks: Art in Action, a 15-week inaugural series for its new exhibition space, the first of its kind dedicated to live and performance art. The former Bankside Power Station’s oil tanks provide the perfect setting for the multitude of media found in live art. Dance, large-scale installation, film, and soundscapes by the genre’s most cutting-edge artists fill the underground tanks, fostering a very physical interactive experience.

Performance art deals with the desire to engage with art without relying on an outside object—to use one’s body as the artistic tool. Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker exemplifies this notion with an adaptation of her seminal performance piece Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. Keersmaeker responds to Reich’s repetitive compositions with synchronized, metronomic movements, resulting in a dizzying and bemusing display. The Tate’s first commission for the Tanks is of the interdisciplinary video artist Sung Hwan Kim, who’s incorporated actors, excerpts of Rainer Maria Rilke, a girl with a beating heart at the top of her neck, paintings, and sculpture into his live work in the past.

Tate: Art in Action runs 18 July-28 October 2012

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