Tank Magazine Podcast

In this week's episode, Lauren Lee contemplates Paddington Bear. A blithe kind of character, the Peruvian bear's slapstick escapades underwrite anxiety about the legal and judicial systems that designate belonging.

In this week's TANK podcast, Helen Charman considers the dark resonances of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show is known for its depictions of distinctly otherworldly evil. What does it have to say about violence that’s altogether more ordinary?

From the Autumn 2024 issue of TANK, this article by Nell Whittaker examines the tunnel and its function as both network and portal. From troglodyte home to conspiracy theory trope, Whittaker casts a light onto the tunnel’s dark promise of dissolution.  

Best-known for their ground-breaking audio and video walks and multi-media sound installations, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller created one of their most memorable works, The Missing Voice (Case Study B), for Artangel in 1999. Part detective story, part psycho-geographical expedition, the soundtrack was experienced through headphones whilst walking the streets of Whitechapel in East London. They talk with James Lingwood and Michael Morris about making The Missing Voice and explore installations inspired the music of Thomas Tallis and Leonard Cohen, and the pleasures and challenges of living and making their art together.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Artist and composer Heiner Goebbels describes his mechanised installation ‘Stifter’s Dinge’, made in collaboration with Artangel in 2008, as “a composition for five pianos without pianists, a play with no actors, a performance without performers”. Adalbert Stifter was a 19th-century Austrian landscape writer known for his obsessive descriptions of the natural world, ‘Stifter’s Dinge’ was an invitation for audiences to experience many different landscapes and weather systems intercut with fragments of recorded text from Malcolm X, William S. Burroughs and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Heiner Goebbels joins Michael Morris and James Lingwood to discuss ‘Stifter’s Dinge’, and his later Artangel collaboration ‘Everything that happened and would happen’ which commemorated 100 years since the end of the First World War in 2018 with performances in Manchester, New York and St Petersburg.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture House was a quiet memorial in Bow, East London and a lighting conductor for impassioned debate in the local community and the national media. Commissioned by Artangel, House led to Whiteread becoming the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993. Whiteread sat down with James Lingwood and Michael Morris on the 30th anniversary of the demolition of House to recall how the work came into the world and reflect on what it felt like to be in the eye of a media storm. They also talk about other public sculptures of hers including Holocaust Memorial in Vienna and Cabin on Governor’s Island in New York City, as well as a surprising shift in her work that came about during the pandemic.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

“In the great prison where I was then incarcerated, I was merely the figure and the letter of a little cell in a long gallery. One of a thousand lifeless numbers, as of a thousand lifeless lives,” wrote Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, a long letter addressed to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas whilst enduring his brutal confinement in Reading Gaol in 1897. Over a century later, Reading Prison was opened to the public for the first time for Inside, an exhibition orchestrated by James Lingwood and Michael Morris with 30 international artists, performers and writers in 2016. Writer, director and performer Neil Bartlett, and writer and theatre-maker Gillian Slovo recall their experiences of the prison, the exhibition and their own contributions; Bartlett’s reading of Wilde’s De Profundis in the prison chapel, and Slovo’s letter to her mother Ruth First, who had been locked up in solitary confinement by the apartheid regime in South Africa.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

A titanic figure in performance, Pina Bausch’s blend of elaborate staging and innovative choreography remains unparalleled even 15 years after her death. Former co-director of Artangel Michael Morris and Artistic Director and Co-Chief Executive of Sadler’s Wells Alistair Spalding reminisce about their late friend.

Over the past two decades Yto Barrada has made a vital contribution to cultural life in the city of Tangier in Moroco, across north Africa and the Middle East. She talks with James Lingwood and Michael Morris about the vision for her most recent project The Mothership, an ‘eco-campus’ in Tangier developed with Artangel over recent years; a place for growing and making where artists and artisans, botanists and ecologists, amateurs and experts explore the rich and varied world of natural dyes. They discuss her work as an archivist and activist, and the reasons behind her decision to withdraw her work from the Barbican Centre’s recent exhibition Unravel - The Art and Politics of Textiles.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

What are the boundaries of mutual understanding and empathy? Marcus Coates’ powerful and poignant Artangel work The Directors offers a profound exploration into this question. In five films, Coates reenacted the experiences of five individuals in recovery from psychosis, each directing him from behind the camera. The work was an attempt to create a reciprocal dialogue between Coates and the directors in order to recognise the other’s shared humanity and help reduce the stigma of psychosis. In conversation with Michael Morris and James Lingwood, Marcus Coates is joined by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, who has his own history with Artangel in the exhibition The Concise Dictionary of Dress made in collaboration with fashion curator Judith Clark in 2010. HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023. The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Part theatrical event, part archeological dig, ‘The Vertical Line’ was an Artangel production by the director and actor Simon McBurney and the writer and art historian John Berger. Performed in “the darkness of rock” 30 metres beneath central London, audiences were magically transported 30,000 years back in time from the platforms of the disused Strand station below Aldwych to the Chauvet Caves, site of some of the world’s most ancient forms of human expression. Simon McBurney joins Michael Morris and James Lingwood to discuss the project and his creative partnership with John Berger. HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023. The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

The performance artist, filmmaker, musician, and composer Laurie Anderson has long been one of the most compelling multi-media chroniclers of our time. At heart a storyteller and alchemist, she makes poetry out of technology, using imagery and language in all its forms to reveal something universal out of personal experience. Laurie Anderson has collaborated on several occasions with Artangel and she is joined by Michael Morris and James Lingwood to reflect and to discuss her current hopes, fears and preoccupations. HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023. The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

In 2001, Jeremy Deller restaged the Battle of Orgreave, one of the most notorious conflicts of the 1984 UK miners’ strike. Deller’s first decision was to involve former miners who had experienced the original battle, performing alongside historical reenactors. This was a forensic attempt, in Deller’s words, to “revisit a crime scene, dig up a corpse and give it a proper post-mortem”. His subsequent work ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, featuring actors dressed as World War One soldiers silently deployed across the UK to mark the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, similarly reflected Deller’s call to “re-live” painful moments in British history. Jeremy Deller joins James Lingwood and Michael Morris to discuss the production of ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ and how the artist has repeatedly explored the intersections of memory, public inquiry and masculinity.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

Since the 1970s, Roni Horn has been intimately involved with the distinctive geography, geology, culture and climate of Iceland. She talks with James Lingwood and Michael Morris about her longstanding relationship with the island and how her project with Artangel, the installation ‘Vatnasafn/Library of Water’, was realised in a former library building in the coastal town of Stykkishólmur. Housing a collection of glacial water collected across Iceland and weather reports from people in the local community, the Library of Water is emblematic of Horn’s ongoing exploration, in her writing, drawings and sculpture, of weather, water and the shifting nature of identity.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

In 1518, an unusual plague engulfed the city of Strasbourg. Scores of people were “infected”, compelled to dance for weeks on end, beyond exhaustion and sometimes to their deaths. 502 years later, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the globe, in rapid response filmmaker Jonathan Glazer made 'Strasbourg 1518' with Artangel. A vision of confinement, liberation and constraint, featuring some of the world’s leading dancers, moving to a new score by Mica Levi and shot entirely on iPhone. The film’s technical daring marked a continuation of Glazer’s radical experiments in film form, which he discusses here with Michael Morris and James Lingwood.HERE IS WHERE WE MEET is a sequence of conversations conducted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, co-directors of Artangel from 1991 until 2023.The theme music for the series is written and performed by PJ Harvey.

“Oftentimes a memory knows that the body cannot handle it, so it protects you and breaks itself into these fragments, and redistributes itself...”In this week's TANK Podcast, Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans discusses her recent collaboration with Miu Miu for their FW24 show, a film exploring the ramifications of a digital storage crisis. Starring Guslagie Malanda, the film continues Evans' inquiry into how emotion interrelates with ideological and societal structures. She discusses memory, nonbinary identity and the practicalities of creating for a fashion show. 

“What we see at DeSmog is people using a playbook, and that's the same as the tobacco industry and the fossil fuel industry before them...” Hazel Healy, environmental journalist and UK editor of DeSmog, a platform investigating climate change misinformation, speaks to TANK on the spin tactics used by the agricultural industry. Speaking at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, Healy dishes the dirt on how major agricultural corporations obscure the environmental impact of their practices. 

“Love is impossible as long as it is attached to physical, emotional and economic safety...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Caroline Issa decodes Simone de Beauvoir's classic of feminist philosophy, The Second Sex. Assessing anthropology, history and biology, de Beauvoir illustrates the mechanisms of female oppression over two millennia. 

“It's possible to be a feminist and a Freudian...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Holly Stevenson and Rosie Gibbens discuss Hans Richter's seminal surrealist masterpiece Dreams that Money Can Buy, a dreamy and deeply strange dadaist romp directed by some of the luminaries of the 1940s avant garde.

“The East, in need of 'civilising', became a fertile ground for colonial ventures...” In this week's TANK Podcast, Caroline Issa assesses Edward Said's enduring 1978 book Orientalism, a treatise into the imperialist attitudes underpinning Western conceptions of the East.