Gallery Life Project: We Forgot the Lot! Tate Britain x Touretteshero (2014)
For this neurodiverse, superhero‑style takeover of Tate Britain in 2014, we worked as performance duo chris+keir to create a live research hub for 500 young people with Tourettes and associated conditions. Using neon, stickers, priceless art, cameras, lab coats, comedy glasses and William Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, we transformed the galleries into a space for playful investigation and collective mischief.
Commissioned by Tate Britain and Touretteshero, our performance‑based intervention formed part of We Forgot the Lot!, a celebration marking the reopening of Tate Britain’s newly renovated galleries and learning spaces. The project invited children and young people, with and without Tourettes, to reinvent, disrupt and reclaim 500 years of British art.
As chris+keir, we asked our young researchers to explore three deceptively simple questions: what makes a successful gallery space for sleeping, how many people can fit in a gallery doorway, and how, where and what you can stare at in a gallery.
Uniformed and energised, our researchers roamed Tate Britain with cameras and a shared sense of fun, curiosity and investigative zeal. Throughout the day we collected and streamed their findings into a custom‑built motion‑graphic display, creating a constantly evolving record of more than 500 images that captured how young neurodiverse audiences experience and reshape museum space.
