It begins with a low but overwhelming rumble, from a stack of speakers at the back of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Forty thousand watts of sub-bass and dialled-down beats roll through the space and through my guts, courtesy of Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, musician and founder of Hyperdub records – and producer of the dubstep artist Burial. Like Burial’s music, the soundscape feels as much physical and internal as aural. More threatening than ambient, it is a kind of melancholy assault. Is this why people are in tears, as they wander, sniffling, from a small, brightly lit side room? Someone stamps a number on the back of my hand as I go in. I think it reads 926577101000 – which seems weird – but the number is fading now. It is a memory of bodies, the number going up with each visitor. It is also an ascending number recording the number of people who last year migrated from one country to another, plus the number of migrant deaths recorded between the start of Tania Bruguera’s project and today. I find this somewhat confusing. In fact, Bruguera’s commission – apparently titled after this escalating figure and thus changing all the time – is full of complications, some more visible than others.
“This room contains an organic compound that makes you cry” says the sign. Is Boris Johnson in there? Brett Kavanaugh? Some other revolting organic compound in human form? The room is empty, but for a searing smell of camphor or eucalyptus. It is like bathing in Olbas oil or a tub of Vicks chest emollient. It didn’t make me cry but it cleared the tubes. Kode9’s sub-bass is having a similar effect on my intestines, but that too could be a reference to the recent, invisible sonic attacks purportedly experienced by US diplomats in Bruguera’s native Cuba. Maybe we are meant to think of teargas in this little chamber, but I take it as a kind of chemically induced empathetic reaction, a way of bringing visitors together.
The Turbine Hall’s concrete has also been paved with glossy, black-painted interlocking metal sheets, as unpleasantly bituminous and shiny as tar. I wondered, briefly, if this were a Liberate Tate comment on BP’s sponsorship of the arts.
In the rear part of the space, beyond the ramp and the first floor bridge and in front of Kode9’s speakers, another area of the floor, bigger than a tennis court, has been overpainted a flat, uniform grey. People are lying around, and pressing their hands to the floor. The imprint of their bodies and palms lingers on the grey and seems almost to glow with ghostly afterimages. I am reminded of Yves Klein’s Anthropometries, where the artist pressed women’s bodies, covered in blue paint, on canvases, or used them as living stencils, spraying around them. The floor-paint is heat-sensitive. I imagine visitors having a lot of fun with this, making fanciful, quickly fading group imprints on the grey, just as visitors to Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 Turbine Hall commission used their bodies as a kind of human alphabet, writing messages that were reflected in the mirrored roof. It is always selfie-time in the Turbine Hall. The black paint on the ramp is heat-sensitive, too.
Bruguera’s Hyundai commission is a complicated affair. If enough people heat up the floor, an image appears, a blown-up portrait of a young asylum seeker who arrived from Syria in 2011. His image was selected by local activist Natalie Bell, and Bruguera has renamed Tate Modern’s Boiler House galleries in her name. All the gallery signage – on the walls, in the lifts, and in gallery publicity material now bears Bell’s name, and will do for the next year.
Bruguera’s commission is extended by her work as lead artist for Tate Exchange (following Tim Etchells and Clare Twomey), working with 21 Tate Neighbours, members of a group who all live or work in the postcode around Tate Modern. This is more than a spin-off project. Both through their activities in the Tate Exchange galleries, in manifestos and statements that appear when you log on to Tate Modern’s wifi system, Tate Neighbours are asking visitors to engage in activism, focusing on “civic responsibilities and selfless actions”.
Doubtless some of this will filter through. Bruguera’s project certainly asks more than SUPERFLEX’s stupid swings did in the last Hyundai commission. She wants to bring people together, to make us cry, to reveal an image through our collective presence and the heat of our bodies. She wants us to think of Tate Modern in relation to its locale, with all the social contradictions of its immediate surroundings. The doomy rumbling bass is perhaps a bulwark against visitors experiencing the latest Turbine Hall project as just another bit of flimsy entertainment. It is a bit unhinging, an intimation of the horrors around us, the horrors ahead. But who knows? Perversely, on a visceral level I like it a lot. But the project as a whole feels somehow unfocused. The overall aim is I think to give us a sense of communality, but instead it feels fragmented.
• Tania Bruguera’s Turbine Hall commission is at Tate Modern, London, until 24 February 2019.
