ajay hothi

tank.tv opened as an online film and video art gallery in 2003, owned by TANK magazine and run by Laure Prouvost. It made a name for itself; in 2007, tank.tv produced a DVD of artists’ moving image, featuring interviews, curatorial projects, and new work from people including Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Slavoj Žižek, Jeremy Deller, and Rem Koolhaas. In 2009, Laure left to go on to be a famous artist – she would win the 2013 Turner Prize. In 2010, I was hired to replace Laure.

When I arrived, tank.tv was in a state of disrepair. One of the things about websites is that if they don’t produce content, they die. With no-one in charge for almost nine months, audience figures had dropped to zero. To cut a long story short, I worked hard to bring life into the project, because I did see real value there. In addition, almost everyone at TANK was lovely to work with and I enjoyed being there.

There were a few things I did to begin, which I’ll bullet-point here:

• Invited friends and artists into the tank.tv archive of c.800 films to curate their own season.
• Made the full archive of tank.tv’s seven year history of exhibitions available to view.
• Organised and curated one-off shows and pop-ups at events, festivals, and venues including the Armory Show, the 2011 Athens Biennial, and The Showroom, London.

These activities, and more, enabled us to get something of a profile and an audience again. I used that to make an application to Arts Council England, and in 2013 I was awarded £25k in funds, matched by TANK and sponsors, to open the tank.tv gallery, in London’s West End, directly behind the BBC.

Over the next few years, I put together a series of exhibitions, residencies, and commissioned a new artwork. In numbers:

• 19 exhibitions
• 2 online/on-site residencies
• 1 new artist commission
• On-site audience, approx. 6000
• On-line audience, approx. 25000
• 57 artists from 11 countries
• Shows of sculpture, video, print, installation, painting, architectures, work in-progress events, mobile and computer apps, objects, poetry and performance.
• 1 feature on Channel 4 news

There are way too many people to acknowledge, so this list is a work-in-progress in itself. tank.tv wouldn’t have happened without Masoud Golsorkhi, Sohrab Golsorkhi, Caroline Issa, Christabel Stewart, Anna Reading, Rozsa Zita Farkas, Andrew Norman Wilson, Dora Budor, Alessandro Bava, Philip Timischl and Sarah Ortmeyer, Paul Kneale, Josh Bitelli, Harry Burke, Eloise Bonneviot, Felix Nash, Attilia Fattori Franchini, Paul Flannery, Adham Faramawy, Terry Ryu Kim, Poppy Deyes.

Below is a video walkthrough of the tank.tv website before it was permanently closed in 2019.

For REF2021, I submitted tank.tv as a curatorial project. Below is a PDF of the submission and full details of tank.tv, it’s contexts and legacies.