When I received an invite from a A Twin Fish a.k.a. stillwater to join her for a talk at the Tate Modern on February 6, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to go. I didn’t have the time, and to be honest, I was still grappling with the outcomes of the symposium I’d attended 2 days earlier. She managed to convince me however, that I pretty much HAD to attend because there was to be a story-telling performance involved. So of course, my ears pricked up, my brain started to get excited and I agreed to join her at the Tate’s Experiences of the Dark lecture series, this particular event being titled The Black Hole.
So what is this lecture series about, and why did it get me excited? The Tate Modern (like all great museums should do) has organised a special set of talks, workshops and performance in and around the installation of a new artwork by Polish artist Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is. This installation is part of the Tate’s Unilever series which has included works by Anish Kapoor and Juan Muñoz in the past. These works are usually installed in the museum’s massive Turbine Hall and are free to the public to come, observe and experience.
How It Is by Miroslaw Balkav
When I walked into the Turbine Hall recently however, I looked around for this famous new piece that everyone was talking about. “Where on earth is How It Is??” I asked myself. I couldn’t see anything anywhere. I read plaques that annouced the piece, saw Miroslaw’s name everywhere and yet I couldn’t figure where I was suppoed to be looking. Until I realised that I was supposed to be looking at a rather large metal container sitting at the back of the Turbine Hall, looking very smug, fitting in rather too well with the environment and mimicking the surrounding architecture so spectacularly, that I hadn’t realised it was a “work of art”. I tend to be daft about these things, but as soon as I walked around to the entrance of the installation, it ocurred to me that this experience was going to be anything but ordinary.
The installation – one might even call it sculpture or architecture – is a 13 meter high, 30 meter deep box-space filled with beautiful velvety darkness. At you stand on the threshold of the darkness, wondering just how to venture into it, its sheer size is awe-inspiring. That awe quickly turns to terror and aprehension before soothing you into numbness as you find yourself surrounded by the inkiness, the outside world reduced to just a hum and the insides of this space becoming clearer and clearer as your eyes adjust to the absence of light. It’s a fantastic experience and it conjures up all kinds of imagery: of black holes and dark alleyways; of long corridors and deep trucks; the bogeyman and the bodies of strangers to bump into as you fumble through the container, feeling its walls, breathing in the dark.
“The lecture can’t be all that bad,” I thought to myself as I remembered the installation and got down to booking my tickets online.
