Joan Jonas: Draw Without Looking

Joan Jonas, one of the most significant artists in the history of video and performance art, opens the BMW Tate Live Performance Room 2013 series with a new work created especially for an online audience. BMW Tate Live Performance Room is a pioneering strand of live, online performances simultaneously seen by international audiences across world time zones at www.youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive.

Jonas’s new work for BMW Tate Live Performance Room will be unveiled live and online on 28 February. Jonas, using her own teaching notes as initial source material, has devised and recorded a set of instructions in the form of a poem. Both these prepared and improvised instructions ­– ‘draw for an audience’, ‘fold paper’, ‘make a mask’ and others – will be performed spontaneously by a group of Jonas’s art students in the Performance Room. They will have access to simple props – shapes, sticks, paper, woodblocks, bells, drawing materials – and perform against a backdrop of abstract video and music.