Legacy: Thinker in Residence Awards

Two artists receive Live Art awards of £30,000 each.

The Live Art Development Agency and Tate Research are delighted to announce that Anne Bean and Tim Etchells will receive Legacy: Thinker in Residence awards of £30,000 each.

The Legacy awards have been set up in recognition of the breadth of influence of Live Art practice in the UK today, and to acknowledge its achievers and achievements over the last few decades. These two awards celebrate artists whose outstanding bodies of work have tested the nature and possibilities of live practices and who have had a demonstrable influence on the development of the Live Art field.

Bean and Etchells will carry out extensive research throughout 2009 addressing the legacies of performance in art historical contexts, examining the processes and challenges of archiving live work and looking at aspects of their own performance practice in relation to these. Following this, they will translate their findings into the creation of their own legacies, that may take the form of new artworks or publications.

Lois Keidan of the Live Art Development Agency said “Live Art is often an ephemeral and fleeting experience. It raises many questions about what it might leave behind and poses challenges for the artist, the archivist, the art historian, the scholar and the audience alike. Legacy: Thinker in Residence Awards will provide Anne Bean and Tim Etchells with the unique opportunity to examine these issues.”

Nigel Llewellyn, Head of Research at Tate said: “These are pioneering awards which will mean that that the legacy of live art can be thoroughly examined by two outstanding practioners. I have no doubt this research will yield extremely valuable material which will not only shed light on current practice but which will also form a basis for future thinking in this area.”

Following a national nomination process begun in August 2008 and involving over fifty key UK curators, writers, and thinkers, a longlist of forty-nine artists was drawn up for consideration. From these, twelve of the UK’s most influential and inspiring artists were invited to submit proposals on how they would approach the idea of legacy.

The final decisions on the awards were made by a selection panel comprising: Lois Keidan and Daniel Brine (Live Art Development Agency); Nigel Llewellyn (Head of Tate Research); Lizzie Carey-Thomas (Curator Tate Britain); Vanessa Desclaux (Curator Tate Modern); Michael Morris (Director, Artangel); Stella Hall (Creative Director, Newcastle Gateshead Initiative), Claire MacDonald (Centre Director, International Centre for Fine Art Research, University of the Arts London); David A Bailey (senior curator, Autograph); and Mark Waugh (Director, A Foundation).

Panellist Claire MacDonald described the recipients as “two brilliant artists who speak to the present condition and the history of performance in distinctive and powerful ways”.

Legacy is a one-off initiative developed in collaboration between the Live Art Development Agency and Tate Research. It is financially assisted by Arts Council England and the Live Art Development Agency.



Live Art is one of the most vibrant and instrumental of creative practices in the UK. Live Art is not a description of a new artform, but a framing device for a catalogue of approaches to the possibilities of live works by contemporary artists who chose to operate across, in between, and at the edges of artistic disciplines to open up new artistic models, new languages for the representation of ideas, new ways of activating audiences, and new strategies for intervening in public life.

Anne Bean (Born 1950, Zambia.Resident in London) has undertaken numerous solo and collaborative projects worldwide, for nearly 40 years, in diverse media including performance, installation, drawing, photography, video and sound, using materials that range from fire, wind, steam and honey to laughter and breath. In early 2008 she was commissioned by the National Archives to create a permanent installation for their museum at Kew. In summer 2008 she went to Croatia, Iraq-Kurdistan and Spain where she worked with local people to develop and produce performances and installations referencing local history. In autumn 2008 she presented 4 installations for Power Plant, a part of a Liverpool City of Culture programme commissioned by the Contemporary Music Network as well as a performance for Liverpool Biennial Made-Up Weekend. In November she completed a video inspired by Darwin, commissioned by Artsadmin and DVDance supported by the Wellcome Trust and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. In 2007, she was the International Fellow at Franklin Furnace Archives, New York.

Tim Etchells (Born 1962 in UK. Resident in Sheffield) is an artist and a writer. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world renowned performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with a range of visual artists, choreographers, and photographers including Meg Stuart, Elmgreen & Dragset, Hugo Glendinning, Vlatka Horvat and many others. His work ranges from performance to video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. He has also developed a unique voice in writing for and about performance - his monograph Certain Fragments (Forced Entertainment and Contemporary Performance), (Routledge 1999) is widely acclaimed. Etchells has also published fiction; Endland Stories (Pulp Books 1998) and The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer) (Duck Editions, 2000) are now followed by his first novel - The Broken World - which takes the form of a guide to an imaginary computer game and was published by Heinemann in July 2008. In recent years he has exhibited work at Sketch and Butchers (both London), Netherlands Media Art Institute (Amsterdam), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), Art Sheffield 2008, ArtFutures (Bloomberg SPACE, London), The Centre for Book Arts, Canada and Exit Art (all New York), Kunsthaus Graz and Manifesta 7 in Italy.

The Live Art Development Agency offers Resources, Professional Development Initiatives, and Projects for the support and development of Live Art practices and critical discourses in the UK and internationally. The Agency works strategically, in partnership, and in consultation with artists and organisations in the cultural sector.