I am sitting on the floor of the Tate Turbine Hall and strangers keep coming up to me and telling me highly ppersonal stories about themselves.
There is the young Chinese engineer who confesses to being a reformed liar, the Caribbean woman who dreams every night of carrying a heavy load of stones on her back up a very steep hill and the Sri Lankan woman who can’t decide whether to have children or not.
For they are all storytellers and part of Tino Sehgal’s radical installation, the first performance piece to be given space in the Turbine Hall.
One thing the Tate had not expected though is that members of the public would join in, not so much with the storytelling as with the participation in the event by running, walking and singing too.
And I too joined in. It was a theatrical experience bordering on the quasi-religious in the way it brought total strangers together so that they became one huge cohesive body moving, flowing and sometimes stationery in the huge space of the Turbine Hall.
Did it work? Yes, because we have reached a stage in the visual world where we no longer want to stand passively in front of a work of art. We want , and expect in this internet age, to be able to interact with it in some way.
We are witnessing th blurring of edges between the arts, helpd by technology: the artist and viewer become inter-changeable, like th writer and the reader.
Will the artist and writr in the future become more like curators?
Yet the work had a surprising sense of deja-vu for me. Some ten years ago while an internationl exchange student to The School of the Art Institute in Chicago I witnessed a very similar performance by some students in their end of term show.
