Geoff Dyer | 13 min
Geoff Dyer reads from his new book The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (Canongate, 2022), in which he addresses mortality and finality by way of Bob Dylan, Jean Rhys, Friedrich Nietzsche and J.M.W. Turner. Published just before Federer’s long-anticipated retirement, the book traffics in endings and exits with Geoff’s typical humour and attention to life’s detail.
Gboyega Odubanjo | 1 min
Gboyega Odubanjo (1996–2023) was born and raised in East London. His pamphlets While I Yet Live and Aunty Uncle Poems were published in 2019 and 2021, and his first full-length collection, Adam, will be published by Faber & Faber on July 4 2024. In June 2023, Gboyega visited TANK to read three poems from Adam – watch the others here and here.
Jessica Au | 10 min
Jessica Au’s novellaCold Enough for Snow (Fitzcarraldo, 2022) follows a mother and daughter as they travel to Tokyo and traverse the city, walking and eating in small restaurants and looking at modern art, and talking all the time. What slowly unfolds is a portrait of two women and a relationship that contains silences as well as stories.Jessica reads an extract for TANK in which the protagonist’s sister recalls two visits to Hong Kong, a city built from snapshots and sensation.
Gary Younge | 4 min
Gary reads an extract from his latest book, Dispatches from the Diaspora (Faber, 2023), a broad and unflaggingly perceptive collection of his journalism since 1994 and further proof of his standing as one of Britain’s few true public intellectuals.
Kathryn Scanlan | 5 min
Kathryn Scanlan reads from her slim, sensational book Kick the Latch(Daunt, 2023) – the real-life story of Sonia, a horse-trainer and groom, told to Kathryn in long conversations. As she told TANK in an interview in the winter issue, “It’s a disturbing book but I think it’s also a funny and hopeful book. I wanted the narrative to mimic the energy and exhilaration of a race.”
Harald Voetmann | 6 min
“The sound of the universe to me has always been the sound of something heavy and solid, hauled by Germanic and Numidian treadmill slaves.”Harald Voetmann reads from his novelAwake, in which Pliny the Elder – sleepless during the long nights of the Roman Empire – dictates hisNatural History to his slave Diocles. Bleeding from the nose, wheezing from his corpulence, Pliny may be confined to his physical body, but his mind ranges: a rose, a galaxy, the moon, the entirety of the natural world charges him with an effusive passion.
A presentation by Carl Williams and Peter Watts | 72 min
In October 2023, Carl Williams Rare Books hosted a ‘show-and-tell’ at TANK GPS, on the former Ludlow Santo Domingo Library - the world’s largest private collection of material on psychoactive substances. Presenting a potent selection of taboo and rare material from the LSD Library, Williams discussed the often very secretive world of transgressive book-collecting alongside the library’s chronicler Peter Watts.
Dal Chodha's paen to Cheap Chic | 13 min
Part fan letter, part essay, You gotta keep your head straight about clothes is an appreciation of the first consumer guidebook to thrift store shopping, Cheap Chic, published in New York in 1975. Author Dal Chodha celebrates the thrifty consumer it conjures, and examines the book’s more contemporary manifestations, including Trinny and Susannah’s terrible and iconic What Not To Wear.
Celebrating arts and craftsmanship with Golden Goose | 0 min
Coinciding with the Venice Biennale, Italian sneaker brand Golden Goose launches Haus of Dreamers, a multifaceted arts program to empower creatives local and worldwide. Six years in the making, the project is based on the site of where Alessandro Gallo dreamed up the brand 24 years ago.
A new podcast series by TANK | 2 min
Hosted by James Lingwood and Michael Morris, TANK’s brand-new podcast features a series of eleven illuminating conversations with artists including Jeremy Deller, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Glazer and Rachel Whiteread. Michael and James were the co-directors of Artangel between 1991-2023, and oversaw the production of some of the most spectacular and influential public art anywhere in the world. Click through to read more.
Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir | 11 min
Caroline Issa reads Simone de Beauvoir’sThe Second Sex, a groundbreaking work that fundamentally transformed discussions around feminism and gender. Beauvoir famously declares that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” a statement that underscores her argument that femininity is not an innate quality, but a social construct. Through a meticulous examination of history, biology, psychoanalysis and anecdote, Beauvoir illustrates the mechanisms of women’s oppression and articulates a demand for liberation that has been taken up by successive generations.
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TANK speaks to artist Andrea Moreno, whose 2024 piece Tita took centre stage in the 19M Galerie Marseille pop-up launched on the occasion of Chanel showing their Cruise’24 collection in the city.
An interview with Cecile B. Evans | 11 min
Cécile B. Evansis a Belgian-American known for their use of video, installation, sculpture and performance, focusing on the way that emotion in valued in contemporary society – and its rebellion as it comes in contact with ideological, physical and technological structures.
TANK caught them the day after the Miu Miu FW24 fashion show, where they debuted their short film amid a set that included hanging “digital chandeliers”. Cécile talks memory and translation, and reflects on the immediacy of reaction that only a fashion show format allows.
Season 12 guest curator on her selections | 2 min
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose multi-layered practice calls for a profound re-imagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology. Andrea is known internationally for filmic explorations of class, precarity and social justice. Here, she talks us through her selections for Season 12 of Now Showing, Lust for Life.
Andrea’s films screen internationally, at festivals such as Berlin, Istanbul, Locarno, Oberhausen and Rotterdam, as well as at Tate Modern, Lincoln Center and on MUBI. Exhibitions include the London Open (Whitechapel Gallery), Spike Island (Bristol) and Spring Sessions (Jordan), as well as numerous screenings globally in activist spaces, community centres and cinemas. Andrea’s work is distributed by LUX, Second Run, Grasshopper Films and Modern Films.
Her latest film, Wayfaring Stranger, received its World Premiere at the International Film Festival, Rotterdam 2024.Her collected films will be released on Blu-ray by Second Run DVD later this year.Andrea grew up on a large council estate and left school at 16.
By A.K. Blakemore | 12 min
A.K. Blakemore reads from her novelThe Glutton, which reimagines the life of Tarrare, an 18th-century peasant notorious for his voracious appetite and colourful, short life.
Benjamin Bratton on immediacy in the art world | 21 min
“Several semesters ago, I taught a studio in our programme at the University of California, San Diego, and gave the students what I thought was a simple, open prompt: to make a project about something other than themselves, their autobiography, or their lived experience. The prompt received more pushback than any I have given.” Benjamin Bratton on subjectivity as format in the contemporary art world.
Play with TANK | 7 min
Artist Oliver Payne’s CRUST SHMUP is an anarcho, arcade, crust punk shoot-em-up inspired by Napalm Death’s debut album, SCUM (1987). It is a scratchy black-and-white world like an over-photocopied gig poster, the player ship shoots missiles that look like anarchy symbols, and your enemies are approaching police, CCTV, CEOs, oil barrels, BP, Shell, petrol pumps, newspapers and politicians. Read Oliver on the game and its origins in the spring issue, and watch him play above.
Vincent Bevins, Zara Dinnen, Sita Balani & Hannah Proctor | 46 min
In the early spring, we celebrated our publication of 300+ pages dedicated to Immediacy with an in-depth, wide-ranging conversation in the TANK space. Join the audience to hear our panel of esteemed thinkers – writer Vincent Bevins (If We Burn, 2023; The Jakarta Method, 2020); scholar and writer Zara Dinnen (The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture, 2018); scholar and writer Sita Balani (Deadly and Slick, 2023)and academic and writer Hannah Proctor (Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, 2024) – discuss all things immediate, furious, fast and flowing.
Dive on in | 1 min
With the spring issue of TANK concerned with immersion, fluidity, frictionless and flow, we celebrate Sabato De Sarno’s launch collection for Gucci, Ancora by diving into the ball pit.
The brand new Spring issue | 1 min
TANK’s spring issue is dedicated to Immediacy, as defined by Anna Kornbluh, whose new book from Verso Books makes a dazzling diagnosis of our dominant aesthetic mode of urgency, flow, frictionlessness, thinness and instantaneity. In 300+ pages of features, fashion, art, interviews and more we examine the aesthetic paradigm of immediacy and its opposite, mediation: the frictive, difficult process by which we experience active relating.
We’re selling the issue and the book in a discounted bundle for only £25. We urge you to purchase immediately!
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Getting hot and dusty with FILA | 1 min
This spring, we roll in the hay with FILA’s Spring/Summer 2024 collection. Video by Gorka Porres & Lander Ibarretxe, sound design by Jose Plaza, colour grade by Helï Suárez and styling by Fer Sempere.
Sheer and sleek | 1 min
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2024 | 26 min
After she chaired the “agri-spin” panel at ORFC, TANK sat down with Hazel Healy to discuss the work of journalistic environmental investigations agency DeSmog, for which she is the UK editor. DeSmog was founded in January 2006 to clear the PR pollution that is clouding the science and solutions to climate change.Now a global organisation, with reporters and researchers spanning North and South America, the UK, Europe, Africa, and beyond, the DeSmog team works to expose corporate misinformation from major fossil fuel interests, including the likes of ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and others. Here, Hazel discusses how major agricultural corporations work to obscure the environmentally ruinous impact of their work.
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2024 | 42 min
From “climate-neutral beef”, to nature-friendly pesticides, big ag’s powerful PR machine spreads influential narratives – and employs underhand methods – to maintain the polluting status quo. Drawing on examples from the UK, EU and global context, in this panel the investigative journalism outlet DeSmog – and friends – will put corporate tactics under the spotlight. The session will be an insight into the misleading narratives used by big business and will equip ORFC participants to unpick the arguments used by industrial farming lobbies and make space for different visions that allow for the transformation of our food and farming system to benefit both people and nature.
Speakers:Thin Lei Win,Clare Carlile andEmile Frison.Chaired byHazel Healy.
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2024 | 90 min
The accumulation of land and wealth in Britain was made possible through the colonisation of peoples and lands across the globe; through the profits generated through enslavement; and through the creation of an economic system that was built on exploitation, violence and extraction. Land as reparations to communities who are directly affected by these systems and their fallout is one way repair can be attempted and healing and transformation towards something better made possible. This session explores the demands for land as reparations and the strategies that might bring it into being.
Speakers: Miriam Rose, Esther Stanford-Xosei and Andre Kpodonu.Chaired by Naomi Terry.
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2024 | 90 min
As food and agriculture became globalised, peasant organisations from the Global North and South came together and founded the global peasants’ movement, La Via Campesina (LVC), in 1993. La Via Campesina is now over 30 years old, unifies over 200 million peasants around the globe and comprises of over 180 member organisations. It continues amplifying the voices of peasants worldwide, fostering solidarity among diverse communities, inspiring hope and advocating for just and inclusive food systems. Ten years ago a new member organisation of LVC has been founded in the UK: the Landworkers’ Alliance, a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers. Panellists in this session will explain how the peasants movement works and manages to build unity within such a big diversity.
Speakers:Jyoti Fernandes,Morgan Ody,Anders Behrend andChukki Nanjundaswamy.
Genocidal acts committed against the Palestinian people | 11 min
At the end of 2023, South Africa made an application to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The following series of twelve videos constitutes an abridged version of the 84-page application, read by major artists and produced by the Palestine Festival of Literature. Click through to watch.
Lena Headey, Khalid Abdalla, Steve Coogan & Natalie Diaz | 6 min
The substance of the application is drawn from a range of sources within and without of Gaza, including UN officials, journalists and eye witnesses. This introductory section focuses on the nature of the injuries inflicted on the Palestinian people in Gaza. Read by Lena Headey, Khalid Abdalla, Steve Coogan & Natalie Diaz.
Susan Sarandon, Adam Bakri, Sepideh Moafi, Wallace Shawn & Maxine Peake | 4 min
According to reports, 1.9 million Palestinians in Gaza – more than 80% of the population, many of whom were already refugees – have been internally displaced since October 7. Over 250,000 housing units have been damaged and more than 50,000 units destroyed. Paragraphs 56-60 are read by Susan Sarandon, Adam Bakri, Sepideh Moafi, Wallace Shawn & Maxine Peake.
Cynthia Nixon, Tobias Menzies, Morgan Spector, Alia Shawkat, Harriet Walter & Khalid Abdalla | 4 min
Famine in Gaza is “inevitable”, according to UN officials, with deprivation of food used as a “weapon of war”. Read by Cynthia Nixon, Tobias Menzies, Morgan Spector, Alia Shawkat, Harriet Walter and Khalid Abdalla.
Peter Mullan, Sepideh Moafi, Maisie Richardson Sellers & Kathleen Chalfant | 5 min
After Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in June 1967, the Israeli military authorities consolidated complete power over all water resources and water-related infrastructure. Since October 2023, Israel has cut off the water supply to Gaza, exacerbating deteriorating living conditions that have led to widespread disease and death. Read by Peter Mullan, Sepideh Moafi, Maisie Richardson Sellers and Kathleen Chalfant.
Charles Dance, Maisie Richardson-Sellers & Maxine Peake | 4 min
Throughout Gaza, there are acute shortages in, warm clothes, bedding, blankets and critical non-food items; acute shortages of water; soaring rates of infectious disease. “Everywhere you go, people are desperate, hungry and terrified.” Read by Charles Dance, Maisie Richardson-Sellers and Maxine Peake.
Carice van Houten, Indya Moore & Inua Ellams | 5 min
Since October 2023, Israeli attacks on hospitals and healthcare workers across the Gaza Strip have led to the collapse of the entire healthcare system. Read by Carice van Houten, Indya Moore and Inua Ellams.
Kendrick Sampson, Sepideh Moafi, Paapa Essiedu, Simon McBurney & Dario Ladani Sanchez | 6 min
Israel has transformed Palestinian hospitals in Gaza from places of healing into “death zones.” Read by Kendrick Sampson, Sepideh Moafi, Paapa Essiedu, Simon McBurney and Dario Ladani Sanchez.
Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Aida el-Kashef & Paapa Essiedu | 5 min
The destruction of housing units, hospitals, schools, mosques, bakeries, water pipes, sewage and electricity networks threatens to make the continuation of Palestinian life in Gaza impossible. Read by Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Aida el-Kashef and Paapa Essiedu.
Liam Cunningham, Carice van Houten & Khalid Abdalla | 4 min
Israel has damaged or destroyed countless bookshops, publishing houses, libraries & hundreds of educational facilities. It has targeted every one of Gaza's four universities and has damaged or destroyed an estimated 318 Muslim and Christian religious sites so far. Read by Liam Cunningham, Carice van Houten & Khalid Abdalla.
Susan Sarandon, Cynthia Nixon, Sepideh Moafi, Maxine Peake & Aida El-Kashef | 4 min
“Doctors are being compelled to perform ordinarily unnecessary hysterectomies on young women in an attempt to save their lives.” Read by Susan Sarandon, Cynthia Nixon, Sepideh Moafi, Maxine Peake & Aida El-Kashef.
South Africa’s case at the ICJ | 3 min
The final chapter of the series of videos taken from South Africa’s dossier charging Israel with genocide at the ICJ concerns statements from Israeli officials which are genocidal in intent. On January 26 2024, the OCJ made an interim ruling calling on Israel to take all measures necessary to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. Since the ruling, Israel has continued its bombardment of Gaza and has killed three people inside a hospital in the West Bank. This series, the details of South Africa’s case and Israel’s ongoing aggression speak to the need for a continued and sustained uprising in support of the rights of Palestinians everywhere to live in freedom, safety and dignity.
John Berger reads Kanafani | 18 min
"Letter from Gaza" is a short film directed by Perry Ogden, in which renowned art critic John Berger reads Ghassan Kanafani's powerful short story of the same name. The film was produced for the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008. Kanafani's story, written in 1955, is an account of life under Israeli occupation in Gaza, told in the form of a letter from a young Palestinian man to his fiancée, who has left Gaza for a life in exile.
| 30 min
Oxford historian Faisal Devji specialises in studies of Islam, globalisation, violence and ethics. In this episode, Professor Devji considers the place of Palestine in the global context of resistance and struggle, and against wider recent global transformations, arguing that these recent events are likely to have a longer-lasting historical impact than many have so far considered.
With Faisal Devji | 10 min
Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. In the light of the recent rebellion by the Wagner group in Russia, he reflects on the trend for and the perils of using contractors and merceneries.
With Faisal Devji | 10 min
Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. Here he discusses civil war as a historical theme, why it has made a return and how we could break out of its destructive cycle.
With Faisal Devji | 11 min
Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. Here he sets out how neutrality as a mode of international relations is making a most welcomed return. As the historical moment of a unipolar world order passes and with it the need for international law and institutions becomes self evident, neutrality is once again seen as a highly useful position from which to appeal for peace.
Of queen and country | 58 min
Boudica founder Samantha Togni on shaping space within London's dance underground.
See both sides | 39 min
Fronted by Shane Lavers, the New York-based outfit discuss alienation, biography and ways of seeing.
It's a cakewalk | 45 min
New York-based rap legend Cakes da Killa on legacy and what stays on tour.
Coming up roses | 57 min
The Kosovo-born, Amsterdam-based performance artist discusses his effusive new albumThe First Flower.
Post-teen angst | 35 min
The Bristol upstart discusses poker and her dreamy new anthem 'Heaven'.
Deep seated urban decay | 57 min
The Norwegian noisenik on bad instruments and soundtracking Mugler shows
New town burnout | 66 min
The Mount Kimbie-member on the capitalist economics of DJ culture.
