Tate Modern, the museum converted from a London riverside power station, filled its vast entrance hall starting on Monday with a futuristic shelter containing colossal sculptures and 200 bunk beds strewn with books.
TH.2058 is the ninth installation in the Turbine Hall from a series sponsored by Unilever. Artist Dominique Gonzalez- Foerster imagines a place 50 years from now where Londoners seek refuge from continuous rain, surrounded by books, sculptures, and a giant screen projecting science-fiction film clips, Tate said in the exhibition’s press release.
“It rains incessantly in London,” Gonzalez-Foerster wrote in an essay dated October 2058 handed out to reporters. “Not a day, not an hour without rain, a deluge that has now lasted for years and changed the way people travel, their clothes, leisure activities, imagination and desires.”
The work depicts an ecological apocalypse. Viewers slip through colored plastic curtains into a stark shelter where steel, mattress-less bunk beds are lined up. Each has a book on it with a catastrophe-related theme: The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, or Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, or Hiroshima Mon Amour, by Marguerite Duras.
The books are refugees from the torrential rain, which beats down in a haunting sound track beamed through loudspeakers. The odd droplet of water falls on the viewer’s skin.
TURBULENCE AHEAD
“Turbulence — fasten your seat belts,” advised Gonzalez- Foerster at the Tate press briefing, evoking her broadly themed work, and dismissing reporters’ repeated efforts to connect it to the current global financial meltdown. The French artist, born in 1965, dressed youthfully in a striped sailor’s top and blue jeans, her long stringy hair loosened to the waist.
The bunk beds are placed at the feet of monumental sculptures — larger-than-life replicas of Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider (Maman, 1999) and Calder’s Flamingo (1973), among others. The sculptures have been brought inside the shelter to stop them from growing bigger and bigger in the tropical rain.
On the back-wall screen are edited clips of futuristically themed films: from The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg) to Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner) to Repulsion (Roman Polanski).
Gonzalez-Foerster said there were many possible “doors” into her work, and levels on which it could be read. She was drawn to participatory art after working as a museum security guard and being “so shocked to see how little time people spent looking at the works.”
“I’ve always been obsessed to keep the viewer longer,” she explained.
Visitors to the Turbine Hall, where TH.2058 will be shown through April next year, can lie on a bunk bed and read a book, peering through the steel grid of the bed above at the belly of Bourgeois’ spider.
Flashbacks to World War II and Blitz-era London are not accidental. Gonzalez-Foerster says she clearly remembers a wartime photograph of a reader browsing a book beneath the bombed-out ceiling of the British Library.
She herself is a by-product of World War II: Her father did his military service in Germany, where he met her mother. Without the war, “I would never have been born,” she said.
Previous participants in the Unilever series include Doris Salcedo, who, through April this year, showed Shibboleth, a 167m crack in the concrete floor of the hall; and Carsten Hoeller, who installed slides between October 2006 and April 2007 that visitors could slip down.
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