TATE MODERN today announced the three artists taking part in this year’s BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Faustin Linyekula, Okwui Okpokwasili and Tanya Lukin Linklater.

These artists, who each use the body in different ways to explore history, inheritance and storytelling, will create ten days of live performances and site-specific installations for Tate Modern’s underground Tanks.

Opening on March 20, this will be the fourth annual BMW Tate Live Exhibition, part of the museum’s innovative performance programme in partnership with BMW.

Linyekula blends theatre, dance and music to articulate his experiences of social-political tensions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Imagining the body as an archive he works with a circle of collaborators to physically express the traumatic legacies of colonialism and the upheaval of the DRC’s history since independence.

Okpokwasili explores the collision of memory and the present in her durational performances, activating installations designed by her partner Peter Born. Brought up in the Bronx, New York, Okpokwasili’s intensely physical performances make visible the experiences of women of colour, sometimes drawing from her Nigerian roots.

Lukin Linklater uses performance, poetry and installations to call attention to Indigenous histories. Originating from two communities in the Kodiak archipelago of southwestern Alaska – the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions – Lukin Linklater draws on interactions with her extended family, Indigenous knowledge and Alutiiq and Cree experiences on the land to inform her work.

Each artist raises questions about shared memory, visibility and the relationship between material culture and immaterial tradition, challenging what these ideas mean within the context of a modern art museum.

This ten-day exhibition will involve ticketed evening performances as well as free installations to explore during gallery hours. It will be accompanied by a programme of live events and collaborative workshops.

BMW Tate Live Exhibition 2020 will be the fourth edition of this experimental annual exhibition, following Anne Imhof’s sell-out performances in 2019.

Taking place in the Tanks, the world’s first museum spaces dedicated to performance, film and installation, the BMW Tate Live Exhibitions have showcased a wide range of artists including Joan Jonas, Fujiko Nakaya, Isabel Lewis, Jason Moran, Min Tanaka, Jumana Emil Abboud, Wu Tsang and Fred Moten.

This is part of Tate’s wider commitment to exhibiting, collecting and researching live performance art.

Last year Tate announced a new fund to enable the staging of live works from the national collection and has since presented performances by Rose Finn-Kelcey, Tony Conrad and Allora and Calzadilla across Tate’s galleries.