Art, Activism and the Tate

The display of Allan Sekula’s Waiting for Tear Gas (white Globe to Black) at Tate Modern from July 2013 to May 2014 coincided partly with Liberate Tate’s creative civil disobedience against Tate’s engagement with their sponsor British Petroleum. The paper examines these two parallel episodes of Tate’s recent institutional history, focusing on the tension emerging from the Tate’s display of an artwork, which stems directly from a grassroots activist movement, and the institutional reluctance to engage with an artist-activist collective that targets the museum itself, or its sponsors. The paper argues that Sekula’s artwork and Liberate Tate’s collaborative artistic interventions and participatory performances are part of a horizontal and rhizomatic network of anti-capitalist struggles against the privatization of every aspect of life, the destruction of the environment and the degradation of human relations and attest to their unfinished nature.