- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is the latest artist to frolic in the largest playground in contemporary art, the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.
TH:2058 explores distopia and invites us to absorb our rotten future at leisure. Lie down, read one of a selection of distopian novels, watch distopian films on a huge screen, or just listen to the distopian rain constantly pattering up above. Did I say distopia was integral to the work?!
A barracks of metal bunk-beds extends across the already oppressive interior of the hall towards a huge screen relaying segments of prophetic sci-fi/apocolyptic films. On each bed is strewn a similarly themed novel (JG Ballard's The Drowned World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 etc) and intersecting the bunker at various points are monolithic sculptures of a frightening tone, which include Louis Bourgeois' Spider.
I felt TH:2008 would have also worked as a title. Nods to surveilance, grey weather, cynicism and fear planted this collection of items firmly in the present. I was genuinely worried about several downcast city-types wallowing in lunchtime gloom, turbine hall suicide on their minds perhaps…
But no, this foray by the French artist is not in truth all that depressing. It allows us to address the worst of the future (or present) and come away unscathed. She certainly plays on the romantic notion of struggle and survival, she is French after all! And if you can hear the rain effects above the tumult of catawalling school children, there's something about this space that is rather zen.
But is there cohesion in these disperate effects? Is this a sketch of the future or a nihilistic theme park? In truth, I feel, it's mostly the latter, which is most probably why it was comissioned. This is the Tate Modern after all, and it has several roles to fulfill as a space for contemporary art: column-inch generator, educator, tourist attraction etc.
So go, lounge in the terrible future, or our vision of it. Lose yourself in distopia. Steal a book…
