Skate the Sky Melon Grab Film: A Live Performance

For the first time, skateboarders will be skating in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern to create a work of art. This is part of UBS Openings: The Long Weekend, an annual festival which is running this weekend.

Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer West will create a new film live at the Tate Modern by uniting an unlikely mix of ink, film strips and skate-boarding. In this unique event, titled Skate the Sky Melon Grab Film, West will build on her previous experiments with everyday materials such as pepper spray or Axe body cologne used to physically manipulate celluloid. West will stage a performance in the Turbine Hall for which a team of skate-boarders will traverse ink-covered film strips, their wheels scraping into the celluloid and marking their movements in complex and psychedelic patterns. This live event will be followed by a screening of the films created plus a selection of West’s earlier films.

If you want to go down and take a look at art in the making, then get yourself down to the Tate Modern this Friday at 7pm. In the meantime take a look at one of her previous films and see what all the fuss is all about.