Projects in the South Tank include a reworking of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s 1982 performance Fase: Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich (18-20 July), which Wood describes as “beautifully polished, high-end work with popular appeal”. “He works on a scale that we thought would fit ,” Wood says. “Temper Clay”, one of “three or four” films created by Kim for the East Tank, takes its title from Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and was made in the Korean mountains and in Seoul. The centrepiece is a new commission by the South Korean artist Sung Hwan Kim (18 July-28 October), supported by Sotheby’s. The inaugural programme has been organised by Kathy Noble, Tate Modern’s curator of interdisciplinary projects, Stuart Comer, the museum’s curator of film, and Wood.

We can experiment and set out our stall for what it will be like when is all open. It’s not the usual case of ‘don’t touch stand behind barriers’. “Some people will be a bit scared if you mention performance art, they think of naked body art in the 1960s. The tanks will host the type of events previously staged “as and when space was available” elsewhere. Both are essentially bare, and there’s no formal seating because every artist wants a different configuration, so it’s lo-fi.” “The South Tank has four columns and the East Tank has nine. The tanks are more than 30m wide and 7m high (around one-third of the size of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall), and have “slightly different characters”, says Catherine Wood, the museum’s curator of contemporary art and performance. m of new space and increase the museum’s size by 60%.

The tanks, which open with a 15-week programme designed as part of the London 2012 Festival celebrating the Olympic Games, are part of a £215m extension project due to be completed in 2016. Tate Modern this month unveils two dark, circular spaces-former oil tanks decommissioned in 1981-as the world’s first permanent museum galleries devoted to performance, installation, video and live art.

The tank tate modern