Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open Wound.
Tate Modern. 9 October 2024 to 16 March 2025.
You know how in some films the director chooses to stage a dramatic or climactic scene – say a shootout – in derelict and decaying industrial premises? I’m thinking of the end of Friedkin’s The French Connection or Scorsese’s The Departed. The human protagonists reach the conclusion of their drama in a setting of abandoned machinery and water dripping from rusty girders into stagnant puddles. I cannot help but think that artist Mire Lee is driven by similar impulses.
Open Wound is Lee’s response to the annual commission to make an artwork to fill Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall. She achieves this with a display of objects which is at once insightful and unsettling. The focus of our attention is the inside of a huge turbine (I took it to be an exploded aero engine) suspended from one of the Turbine Hall’s original cranes. It slowly writhes this way and that and as it does so it oozes a foul looking pink liquid which drips through intestine-like tubes to collect in a large tray underneath. Throughout the rest of the space, suspended from industrial strength chains, are irregular and torn stretched fabric shapes. They are the colour of flesh and, to me at least, evoked the stretched skin used by surgeons to perform a graft or, horribly, the idea of Nazi lampshades.
Thus throughout the piece Lee juxtaposes the mechanical, dangerous and brutal with the soft and organic, all overlaid with the idea of disease and decay. She is also acknowledging the history of the site which, prior to being a major space for the exhibition of art, was Bankside Power Station, a place where men toiled to feed coal-fired turbines which powered the city.
The installation is not static. Over its five months duration more skin sculptures will be made from the oozings of the turbine and carried to a huge drying rack at the end of the hall (redolent of the interior of a cob-webbed mansion) and then added to those already hanging. So there is a sense of regeneration here as well as putrefaction. (I do feel that now, at the start of its run, the space is rather too airy and under-utilised, especially in daylight.)
The Turbine Hall has hosted a good many large scale and thought-provoking works. One remembers Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment, commenting on the ideas of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and Carsten Höller’s playful slides, which invited us to contribute our own bodies to the experience. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, was Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is which drew viewers into a massive black box in which all vestiges of ‘sight’ slowly disappeared. To this list Mire Lee’s Open Wound is a very evocative, if somewhat sinister, addition. It is well worth an hour of your time.
© Graham Buchan, 2024.
Hyundai Commission: Mire Lee: Open Wound.
Tate Modern. 9 October 2024 to 16 March 2025.
You know how in some films the director chooses to stage a dramatic or climactic scene – say a shootout – in derelict and decaying industrial premises? I’m thinking of the end of Friedkin’s The French Connection or Scorsese’s The Departed. The human protagonists reach the conclusion of their drama in a setting of abandoned machinery and water dripping from rusty girders into stagnant puddles. I cannot help but think that artist Mire Lee is driven by similar impulses.
Open Wound is Lee’s response to the annual commission to make an artwork to fill Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall. She achieves this with a display of objects which is at once insightful and unsettling. The focus of our attention is the inside of a huge turbine (I took it to be an exploded aero engine) suspended from one of the Turbine Hall’s original cranes. It slowly writhes this way and that and as it does so it oozes a foul looking pink liquid which drips through intestine-like tubes to collect in a large tray underneath. Throughout the rest of the space, suspended from industrial strength chains, are irregular and torn stretched fabric shapes. They are the colour of flesh and, to me at least, evoked the stretched skin used by surgeons to perform a graft or, horribly, the idea of Nazi lampshades.
Thus throughout the piece Lee juxtaposes the mechanical, dangerous and brutal with the soft and organic, all overlaid with the idea of disease and decay. She is also acknowledging the history of the site which, prior to being a major space for the exhibition of art, was Bankside Power Station, a place where men toiled to feed coal-fired turbines which powered the city.
The installation is not static. Over its five months duration more skin sculptures will be made from the oozings of the turbine and carried to a huge drying rack at the end of the hall (redolent of the interior of a cob-webbed mansion) and then added to those already hanging. So there is a sense of regeneration here as well as putrefaction. (I do feel that now, at the start of its run, the space is rather too airy and under-utilised, especially in daylight.)
The Turbine Hall has hosted a good many large scale and thought-provoking works. One remembers Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment, commenting on the ideas of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and Carsten Höller’s playful slides, which invited us to contribute our own bodies to the experience. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, was Miroslaw Balka’s How It Is which drew viewers into a massive black box in which all vestiges of ‘sight’ slowly disappeared. To this list Mire Lee’s Open Wound is a very evocative, if somewhat sinister, addition. It is well worth an hour of your time.
© Graham Buchan, 2024.
By Graham Buchan • art, exhibitions, installations, sculpture • Tags: art, exhibitions, Graham Buchan, installations, sculpture