Joan Jonas review: Spellbinding fusions of old and new

A perennial pitfall of organising shows of groundbreaking live artists is that you’re left with residues and ghosts of performances to mark their achievements. Joan Jonas is different: from early on in her now six-decade-career, she pioneered a multimedia approach, involving video and sculptural props, drawing, speech and song. So while a couple of her earliest works feel a little remote now, everything else in this show maintains a life in the present.

I’ve been spellbound by performances and installations by Jonas in the past, her elegant fusion of contemporary politics and historic, even primal, human rituals and stories. But seeing several works together, they’re even greater than the sum of their parts, revealing a grand narrative of dualities: body and landscape, stillness and movement, object and image, ancient and modern, permanence and ephemerality.

Jonas performs in several works — drawing, dancing, donning masks — or reads poems and stories. For this year’s BMW Tate Live, Tate Modern’s Tanks are dedicated to Jonas’s work, including her mesmerising Reanimation.

Try to see one of her performances; but the show itself is a triumph.

Until August 5; BMW Tate Live, March 16-24