Exhibition of the week: The Tanks: Art in Action, Tate Modern, London SE1

 

Laura McLean-Ferris
Thursday 19 July 2012 15:14 EDT
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Sung Hwan Kim's installation is the star piece at the exhibition
Sung Hwan Kim's installation is the star piece at the exhibition

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What strange world has opened up beneath Tate Modern? Through a sliding door at one side of the Turbine Hall, one can enter the spaces that were used as oil tanks in the old power station.

Here are more raw, beautiful concrete rooms, developed by Herzog & de Meuron into permanent spaces for live art, a bold move that might transform museum practice.

Tate brings the ephemeral and performative into museum history by showing two works from the collection, Lis Rhodes's Light Music (1975) and Suzanne Lacy's The Crystal Quilt (1985-7), but Sung Hwan Kim's installation – the first Tanks commission – is the star piece: Accompanied by soulful songs, Kim's poetic films are plotted in the dark among lights and sculptures, floatily considering love, companionship, parenthood, power, oppression, migration and political responsibility.

The space looks like the remnants of a lost civilisation as much as the site for a potential new one.

(020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk) to 28 Oct

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