London Rising Tide activists ‘die’ in the Tate Britain (4 January 2008)

Activists ‘die’ in the Tate Britain

Activists from Lon­don Ris­ing Tide staged a ‘die-in’ in the BP spon­sored Tate Britain this after­noon. Bob Jones from LRT said “we’re here to demand that the Tate cut it’s ties with BP, an art gallery is no place for an envi­ron­men­tal haz­ard such as an oil com­pa­ny”. “BP are here to Green­wash their image and dis­tract from the eco­log­i­cal dev­as­ta­tion they’re caus­ing around the world”. The pro­test­ers hand­ed out lots of leaflets and urged patrons to demand the end of Oil Com­pa­nies spon­sor­ship of Art Gal­leries.

The ‘corpses’ were dressed in t‑shirts dis­pa­ly­ing the logos such as ‘art not oil’, ‘bp — fos­sil fools’ and ‘bp out of the tate’. Their epi­taphs was fit­ting for the loca­tion. Once dead the staff on site took the pre­cau­tion of shout­ing to every­body to leave which only attract­ed more peo­ple, and over 200 fly­ers were giv­en out inside the build­ing.

Sev­er­al mem­bers of the pub­lic were very sup­port­ive and even told the staff to stop try­ing to move us ; “these peo­ple are mak­ing more of a state­ment than most of the art in this room” was some­thing i heard being said.

After ask­ing the TATE for a rep­re­sen­ta­tive to dis­cuss the pol­i­cy of accept­ing mon­ey from social crim­i­nals, but they refused as all direc­tors were ‘still on hol­i­day’. A shame.…and i bet they flew too!

All in all, a good day with excel­lent pub­lic response.
we will be back.

20080104_RT_GG_Tate_Invasion — video/x‑ms-wmv 15M
20080104_RT_Tate_QT — video/quicktime 14M