Performance artist and sculptor Joan Jonas investigates the world through sound and visual elements, drawing on influences such as Japanese noh theater. In works like The Juniper Tree, Jonas uses objects including a kimono, a ladder and 29 wooden balls to unfold her distinctive reading of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. From March 15 to Aug. 5, Tate Modern presents an immersive retrospective of Jonas’s work, featuring a 10-day run of live performances by the artist in The Tanks and a dedicated film program in the Starr Cinema.
The exhibition also includes pieces that highlight Jonas’s broad thematic interests. Stream or River, Flight or Pattern (2016–2017) addresses climate change and species loss through layered imagery and sound, while Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) investigates aspects of female identity and the construction of self. The spring presentation was organized in collaboration with the artist and a curatorial team: Andrea Lissoni, senior curator of international art (film) at Tate Modern; Julienne Lorz, curator at Haus der Kunst in Munich; and Monika Bayer-Wermuth, assistant curator at Tate Modern.
Jonas’s practice spans performance, video, sculpture and installation, often combining live action with recorded media to create immersive environments. Her use of ritual, repetition and carefully chosen props encourages viewers to consider narrative, memory and embodiment from new angles. The retrospective foregrounds the way Jonas blends historical references, personal archives and natural materials to construct poetic, sometimes mysterious works that unfold over time.
Visitors to the Tate Modern show can expect a range of formats, from staged performances to film screenings and time-based installations. The Tanks program allows for extended, live encounters with Jonas’s pieces, while the Starr Cinema situates her moving-image work within a context that highlights pacing, montage and sound design. Together, these presentations aim to capture both the immediacy of Jonas’s performances and the layered complexity of her filmed and sculptural practice.
The exhibition’s selection traces key moments across Jonas’s career, underlining recurring concerns such as the relationship between body and object, the role of myth and folklore, and the impact of environmental change on human and nonhuman life. By situating early works alongside more recent responses to ecological crisis, the retrospective creates a dialogue between form and content that reflects Jonas’s continual reinvention and sustained engagement with pressing contemporary themes.
Careful installation and curatorial framing will help viewers move between intimate videos and large-scale, room-based works, allowing for both close looking and immersive encounters. The live performance component offers a rare opportunity to witness Jonas’s methods in real time, emphasizing the performative gestures, vocalizations and spatial choreography that are central to her language as an artist.
Through this retrospective, Tate Modern provides a comprehensive look at Joan Jonas’s influential career, revealing how her experimental approaches to sound, gesture and material have shaped contemporary performance and expanded the possibilities of sculptural practice. The exhibition invites audiences to experience the subtle tensions between the familiar and the uncanny, and to reflect on how stories, objects and environments continue to shape perception.