Tate Modern cultivates interest in latest Turbine Hall show
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Version 0 of 1. Curators at Tate Modern admit they have no idea what might already be growing in 240 soil-filled planters that form its new turbine hall installation by the artist Abraham Cruzvillegas – or what people might throw into them. Related: Abraham Cruzvillegas's Turbine Hall review – a frustrating floating allotment The London gallery on Monday unveiled the inaugural Hyundai commission for the space, Empty Lot, which consists of triangular wooden planters of earth dug up from different areas of London, from Peckham Rye to Buckingham Palace to the Olympic Park in Stratford. They have been installed on a raised platform and it is relatively easy for visitors to scatter seeds or bulbs. Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern, said the work was about “waiting, patience and hope” because these “are the best words to address the situation we live in today”. The work has taken five weeks to install on London’s South Bank, and already a few weeds have sprouted in some of the planters. Curators are also proud of a mushroom that has emerged. “We don’t know what is going to grow, so much is up to chance,” said the installation’s curator, Mark Godfrey. Cruzvillegas said Empty Lot was a space for hope that may get visitors thinking about their own place in the world. “My hope is that something can grow, that something can happen and in a way I look at it as a self-portrait ... I am an empty lot. “I hope that something can happen in the worst of conditions. In our society, all these migrations, all these conflicts ... how can we ask questions?” The planters will be regularly watered and Cruzvillegas has made lamposts to provide light using materials scavenged from local skips and building sites. In total, 23 tonnes of soil has been collected and deposited in the geometric grid of planters. They are held up by a network of scaffolding. Godfrey said Tate Modern had become accustomed to not knowing what would happen to commissions in the Turbine Hall, or how people would react. Who knew, for example, that visitors would come and lie down to bask under the light of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project? Or that people would be stopped from walking through Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds exhibit because of the possible health risks of inhaling ceramic dust? Godfrey said when they were installing the work it was hard to believe anything could or would grow, but within days there were green shoots. Cruzvillegas, a Mexican conceptual artist best known for creating sculptures from objects he finds locally, said it may look like little is going on in the planters but that there is plenty of action. “The real drama is microscopic, the real drama you cannot see but it is there, it is happening ... there is lots of sex.” • Hyundai Commission 2015, Abraham Cruzvillegas: Empty Lot, 13 October to 3 April 2016. |