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Images selected are by well-known artists and photo-journalists, as well as amateur photographers and those using automated technologies such as CCTV. Among the key issues will be the power struggle between those with the authority over image production (artists, authors or the state) and the rights and desires of individuals. This relationship is under increasing pressure,both from the escalating use of surveillance, and the advance of small, portable digital cameras in mobile phones.

Includes work by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand and Garry Winogrand.

Using diverse poetical and allegorical approaches, and working in a variety of mediums such as painting, video projection, animation and sculpture, Alÿs explores political subjects such as contentious borders and economic crises.

He moved to Mexico City in the mid 1980s where he addressed everyday life in works such as Paradox of Praxis 1997 when he pushed a block of ice around Mexico City until it melted. Elsewhere he has looked at Latin America's relationship to modernity. For example in When Faith Moves Mountains 2002, a large-scale action, five hundred Peruvians moved a dune by digging spadefuls of sand. This exhibition follows both his Mexican projects and those that have taken place in Lima, Jerusalem, Panama and London. It includes a new work made in the Strait of Gibraltar.

In collaboration with WIELS and The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Admission £12.50 (   concessions)
Opening hours: Sunday to Thursday, 10.00–18.00. Friday and Saturday, 10.00–22.00. Last admission into exhibitions 17.15 (Friday and Saturday 21.15).
Public information number: 020 7887 8888.
Public information URL: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/poplife/default.shtm
Press release: 24 September 2009

Pop Life: Art in a Material Worldproposes a re-reading of one of the major legacies of Pop Art. The exhibition takes Andy Warhol’s notorious provocation that ‘good business is the best art’ as a starting point in reconsidering the legacy of Pop Art and the influence of the movement’s chief protagonist. Pop Life: Art in a Material World looks ahead to the various ways that artists since the 1980s have engaged with mass media and cultivated artistic personas creating their own signature 'brands'. Among the artists represented are Tracey Emin, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince.

Pop Life: Art in a Material World argues that Warhol’s most radical lesson is reflected in the work of artists of subsequent generations who, rather than simply representing or commenting upon our mass media culture, have infiltrated the publicity machine and the marketplace as a deliberate strategy. Harnessing the power of the celebrity system and expanding their reach beyond the art world and into the wider world of commerce, these artists exploit channels that engage audiences both inside and outside the gallery. The conflation of culture and commerce is typically seen as a betrayal of the values associated with modern art; this exhibition contends that, for many artists working after Warhol, to cross this line is to engage with modern life on its own terms.

The show begins with a focused look at Warhol’s late work, examining his related initiatives as a television personality, paparazzo, and publishing impresario. Highlights include a number of works from his initially controversial series known as the Retrospectives or Reversals. Reprising his celebrated Pop icons from the 1960s, in a manner initially deemed cynical, the Retrospectives look ahead to installations by a number of artists including Martin Kippenberger and Tracey Emin, who overtly engage the self-mythologizing impulse manipulating their personas as a medium, like silkscreen or paint.

Pop Life: Art in a Material World includes reconstructions of both Keith Haring’s Pop Shop and Jeff Koons's seldom reunited Made in Heaven. Haring opened the Pop Shop in 1986 on New York's Lafayette St. to merchandise his branded artistic signature as editioned objects such as t-shirts, toys and magnets aimed at as wide an audience as possible. Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven, which debuted at the Venice Bienniale in 1990, immortalized his marital union with the Italian porn star and politician known as La Cicciolina. A specially-commissioned new installation by the celebrated Japanese artist Takashi Murakami debuts in the exhibition's final gallery.

A gallery dedicated to the so-called ‘Young British Artists’ focuses on their early performative exploits including ephemera from Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’s shop in Bethnal Green where they created and sold their work. Renowned pieces such as Gavin Turk’s Pop 1993 also feature, as does selected works representing Damien Hirst’s recent Sotheby’s auction, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. Tate Modern will also restage Hirst’s performance originally shown at Cologne’s ‘Unfair’ art fair in 1992. Identical twins will sit beneath two identical spot paintings for the duration of Pop Life: Art in a Material World. Tate Modern is appealing for identical twins to take part in this performance.

The exhibition is organized by Tate Modern and is co-curated by Jack Bankowsky, Artforum’s Editor at Large, Alison M. Gingeras, Chief Curator of the François Pinault Collection and Catherine Wood, Tate Modern Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance, assisted by Nicholas Cullinan, Curator, International Modern Art, Tate Modern.  Pop Life: Art in a Material World will travel to the Hamburger Kunsthalle from 6 February – 9 May 2010 and then to the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa from 11 June – 19 September 2010.  The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

The exhibition of works by Jill Magid is based on the artist’s commission by the Dutch Secret Service in 2005. Level 2 is Tate Modern’s space for emerging artists, dedicated to experiment and the latest ideas, themes and trends in international contemporary art. This is Jill Magid's first solo exhibition in the UK.

American artist Jill Magid’s (b 1973) work is deeply ingrained in her lived experience, exploring and blurring the boundaries between art and life. Her performance-based work is characterised by themes of seduction, inviting the audience to follow a narrative of increasing intimacy between the artist and an institution, whereby rules of such institutional engagement are strictly followed, often to the point of absurdity.

In her Level 2 exhibition at Tate Modern, Magid explores the themes of secrets and secrecy, reflecting on the emotional, philosophical and artistic relations between institutions and the individual. The exhibition will be centred around her first novel, Becoming Tarden, which tells the story of Magid’s commission by the Dutch Secret Service (AIVD) to create an artwork for its new headquarters. Her brief was to find the human face of the organisation through conversations with its members.

Intrigued by the question of what it would feel like to surrender her identity and become an agent herself, Magid requested and was granted security clearance, allowing her to penetrate the organisation more deeply. In this way, she began a transformation from artist to agent, echoing the experiences of the author Jerzy Kosinski and the fictional protagonist of his novel, Cockpit, Tarden. Invoking both the fictional character of Tarden and that of his creator, Magid exposes the complex layers of fact, fiction and role playing which surround the mysterious world of intelligence agencies, but also the shift in her own role from artist to agent.

Magid kept a series of handwritten notebooks documenting her encounters with secret agents, from which she created artworks using a wide range of media. The exhibition includes neon sculptures from the series I Can Burn Your Face 2008, a phrase used among secret agents as a threat of identity exposure, a series of drawing, The Directives, letters and photographs.

The exhibition Article 12 at Stoom Gallery, The Hague in 2008 marked the official end of Magid’s AIVD commission. On display at Tate Modern’s Level 2 exhibition will be both Magid’s manuscript, redacted by the AIVD and her un-redacted novel, Becoming Tarden, the latter secured under glass. This way Authority to Remove follows the AIVD’s proposal to present the book as a visual work of art, after which it would become the property of the Dutch Government.

Redacted in one case, inaccessible in the other, the texts on display will keep many of their secrets to themselves and their presence in the exhibition point towards an important insight Magid derives from the project, stating in her report for AIVD: “The secret itself is much more beautiful than its revelation.”

The exhibition is curated by Amy Dickson, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.

Based in Los Angeles since the 1960s, John Baldessari (b. 1931) is one of the most influential artists of his generation. Making his name as a pioneer of conceptual art in the 1960s with his text and image paintings, he shocked the art world when he announced in a newspaper that he was cremating all the artworks he had produced between 1953 and 1966. He then turned his attention to photographic works often incorporating found film stills, trawling dumpsters for discarded material from which he created his famous photo-compositions.

Baldessari's lifelong interest in language, both written and visual, has been at the forefront of both his artwork and his teaching, through which, over more than thirty years, he has nurtured and influenced succeeding generations of artists. His work has had a huge influence on Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Barbara Kruger among others. His works incorporate wit and irony, both mocking conceptual art and delivering it in his written work I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art; superimposing media images and painting with his trademark dots and over-painted figures in The Duress Series; and exploring the idea of subliminal images in advertising in his sequence of ice cubes containing the words of his name, 'U-BUY BAL DES SARI'.

In association with Rolex

Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1958, Balka lives and works in Warsaw and Otwock. Including installation, sculpture and video, his works explore themes of personal history and common experience, drawing on his Catholic upbringing and the fractured history of Poland. Intimate and self-reflective, his works demonstrate his central concerns of identifying personal memory within the context of historical memory.

Memorials play an important role in Balka's personal experience - his grandfather was a monumental stonemason and his father an engraver of tombstones. His early performances and sculpture referred to his experience of the rituals of Catholicism (perhaps made more intense in a country where religion was repressed), while in recent years he has focused on the Holocaust; for Balka a permanent scar on collective memory, with particular resonance in Warsaw and Otwock.

Despite his austerity of form and the seriousness of his subject matter, Balka's work is often imbued with warmth, reflecting his view that:

"After seeing the sadness inscribed in the works maybe some spectators can see that joy can also be found in those moments of life that one lives to the full."

This annual commission invites an artist to make a work of art especially for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. The Series has resulted in some of the most innovative and significant sculptures of recent years.
Admission to The Unilever Series is free.

A radical and multidisciplinary artist (painter, architect, designer, poet, art critic and publisher), van Doesburg played a pivotal role as a conduit for the international exchange of information and ideas. He founded the magazine and movement De Stijl, advocated Dadaist concepts under the pseudonym IK Bonset, taught a De Stijl course in Weimar in opposition to the Bauhaus and forged links with Constructivist groups.

Controversial and opinionated, van Doesburg formed relationships with the most influential artists of mid-century Modernism. There will be over 300 works by 80 different artists on display including works by Alexander Archipenko, Raoul Hausmann, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter, Gerrit Rietveld, Sophie Taeuber and Piet Mondrian.

In collaboration with Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden

Born in Turkish Armenia, probably in 1904, Vosdanik Adoian fled the massacres of 1915 and eventually arrived in America in 1920. There he reinvented himself as Arshile Gorky and, with little formal training, absorbed European Modernism through both his studies and his teaching.

The result was a distinctive synthesis of artistic styles that pushed beyond the creative boundaries of Surrealism.This retrospective covers Gorky's 25-year artistic career which was cut short by his suicide in 1949. With an emphasis on his uniquely lyrical paintings of the 1940s, it will be the most important exhibition of his work for over twenty years.

Organised with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles
 

Bringing together over one hundred works from public and private collections from around the world, the exhibition will take a fresh and compelling look at this master of modern art.

Challenging commonly held assumptions about the artist and his practice and encompassing paintings, sculptures and drawings, as well as a documentary section, the exhibition will reveal the complexity and richness of his narrative strategies for a twenty-first century audience. Key loans include Self-portrait with Manao tu papau 1893, Teha 'amana has many Parents 1893 and Vision of the Sermon 1888.

In collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Washington