Art Not Oil

Invitation to collaborate on a sound artwork in response to BP’s sponsorship of Tate. EXTENDED DEADLINE: 20th April 2011 – the anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. This is also an extended brief including added details from the original version. Submissions in response to either brief are welcome.

This is a call for proposals for a sound artwork to act as an alternative audio tour/guide for the Tate. We want to install a new acoustic territory inside the Tate, to create a sound artwork that can occupy the Tate space yet exist within a much broader conceptual landscape.

The final artwork will be available online for visitors to download onto MP3 players in advance of their visit to the Tate. ‘Alternative Tate’ will be exhibited in Summer 2011. The deadline for submissions is April 20th 2011 .

We welcome expressions of interest from artists working with sound: from Turner Prize winners, to guerilla mash-up DJs, from people writing radio plays, to sound engineers, from field recording specialists to musicians. Although we are framing this as an audio tour, we do not want to restrict the structure of the artwork to a linear, guided narrative – artists are free to interpret the frame of the tour as they see fit.

We suggest that the final sound artwork be 15-30 minutes in length, so that visitors can make a short trip to the gallery, although we will accept proposals for artworks of any length. For the easy experience of the piece we want it to work via headphones.

Liberate Tate has a history of challenging the corporate presence of large oil companies inside cultural institutions, a presence that we feel compromises culture and expression. The alternative audio tour will be part of a broader endeavor to stimulate debate around the relationship between art, oil and climate change.

The artwork could come into contact with issues and themes of control, democracy, censorship, Freedom of Information, voice, corporate power, ecological disasters, creative freedom or the role of museums and galleries in creating and historically capturing culture. For artists that choose to, we propose three thematic suggestions around which to create a sound artwork, detailed below*.

We can offer a fee of £1000 and a budget of £1000 to the sound artist/collectives selected, but no production facilities. In your proposal please include:

● a sample of your previous work
● a written proposal of your ideas for this piece (approx. 500 words)

Timeline:

● April 20th – Proposal deadline
● May/June – Research, development and production
● late June/July (negotiable) – Launch

Please email your digital proposals to liberatetate@gmail.com (and write “Audio Submission” in the subject line) or if you wish to send cd’s or any physical material please post to:

Licence To Spill
PLATFORM
7 Horselydown Lane
London, SE1 2LN

Yours,
Liberate Tate

Liberate Tate is a network dedicated to taking creative disobedience against Tate until it drops its oil company funding.

PLATFORM
This project is supported by Artists’ Project Earth (A.P.E.) and PLATFORM’s Licence To Spill IndieGoGo crowd funding.

Art Not Oil
Since 2004, Art Not Oil has aimed to encourage artists to create work that explores the damage that oil companies are doing to the planet, and the role art can play in counteracting that damage.

* Thematic areas proposals could follow either:
1. ‘Tate: As British as BP’ A sound artwork which follows the route of ‘A Walk Through the 20th century’ (BP British Art Display) in Tate Britain. Tate Britain is as British as BP. Home to British Art, defining what that might be, its founding sponsors are British Petroleum and British Telecom; the restaurant head chef “creates contemporary British menus.” Tate Britain is Britishness in a white cube. And what is that exactly – is Tate as British as BP?

2. Artists’ dissent A work based around the rejection of oil sponsorship by artists, as expressed in various international media, including a letter signed by 171 artists in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/28/bp-tate-curator-oil).

3. Sounds of extraction Using excerpts of interviews from affected communities, sound samples from extraction projects, this artwork uncovers in the Tate space what lies behind the BP logo.