You may have heard of Cuban-born American artist Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), but how much do you know about her art? Her multidisciplinary practice encompassed sculpture, film, performance, photography, painting and drawing, but she is best known for her ‘silueta’, or ‘earth-body', works, in which she outlined her body in nature.

More than 120 of Mendieta’s works are now on view in a new retrospective at Tate Modern in London (15 July 2026 – 17 January 2027), including a nude woman’s form in a tomb covered with sprigs of small white flowers, the flaming form of a body on a sandy landscape, and the shape of a body in a shoreline, being slowly eroded by the tide. The exhibition takes us through Mendieta’s practice, from her teenage years up until around 1984, exploring her whole body of work.

'Tate's involvement with Ana Mendieta really started in the 2000s; we acquired works as early as 2009, so this is not really something new for Tate. But in 2020, when I joined [the gallery] to be in charge of moving image, the first acquisition I worked on with my colleague Mike Wellen, who is the co-curator of this show, was an acquisition of six films by Mendieta, so our representation of the artist really grew tremendously from 2020,’ explains the exhibition’s co-curator Valentine Umansky.

Tate has the largest holding of any museum of Mendieta’s films and this is the biggest-ever UK exhibition of the artist’s work. Many of the works on display have never been shown in the country before.

Mendieta was exiled from Cuba, where she had had an affluent childhood (until her father became a political prisoner), to the United States at the age of 12; there, she lived in foster care with her sister. She went on to study art at the University of Iowa, gaining her MA in 1972, and even in the very early stages of her career she experimented and pushed boundaries by working with themes of violence, gender and ecology. In creating and recording ephemeral works, she explored core themes of death, energy, gender, nature, transformation and spirituality, the last through references to the religion Santeria.

In an early work, Moffitt Building Piece, 1973, she staged the aftermath of an accident on a public pavement and recorded the public’s reaction to it in a series of photographs. This is shown in the exhibition alongside a film work that shows the artist painting the words ‘She Got Love’ in red on a white wooden door. Her work, although it sits in the canon of its time, today feels urgent and radical, partly due to Mendieta’s great gift for image-making and the fact that her subject matter resonates in the current moment.

‘One thing that might be most important is that our awareness of ecology has fundamentally shifted [since Mendieta’s time] and so I had a feeling that younger audiences [and others] in the UK would be very sensitive to some of the topics raised in her works that maybe were not read in this way in the 1970s or 1980s – particularly, her desire and drive to blend [with] or dissolve in nature, and also her care for what we would now call a sustainable mindset,’ Umansky explains.

This is echoed in the restaging of a number of ephemeral works by Mendieta, realised for the exhibition in collaboration with her niece and the head of her estate, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta.

Where no instructions were left for realising these works, Raquel collaborated with the curators at Tate to recreate them as closely as possible in a gallery setting, in some cases for the first time since they were conceived.

Yemaya Gifts, 1982, was originally created for Museo Barrio, an important place for Latin American and Caribbean artists; it has been recreated in sand and mushroom corals for the first time for the Tate Modern exhibition.

For a work in the Untitled: Silueta, 1978, series, a part of the Old Westbury forest at New York College has been recreated using found timber and found and foraged soil, moss and stones.

‘We worked very closely with Raquel Cecilia Mendieta,’ Umansky adds. ‘She had done a series of restagings, but this one [from the Untitled: Silueta, 1978, series] was the first [restaging of that particular work], so it's always an experiment.’

These restagings act as an essential bridge between the documentation film and photography and what must have been the very powerful immediacy of Mendieta’s performances. They also speak to the theme of rebirth that recurs throughout her work.

Much of Mendieta’s work was essentially ephemeral, although very well documented. The exhibition includes sections that reference symbolic locations important to the artist’s work, such as The Grove and The River, while a section called The Repertoire looks at repeated patterns, materials and motifs in her work.

Previous discussion of Mendieta has often centred on the circumstances of her death in 1985 (her husband, artist Carl Andre, was charged then acquitted of her murder after she plummeted from his apartment), but here, we get a deep dive into her legacy as an artist and the impact of her work.

Among the films we see in the exhibition is Sweating Blood, 1973, and Blood Feathers, 1974, where Mendieta covered herself with blood and feathers, transforming herself into a kind of bird, and Grass Breathing, 1974, where she created a kind of pulsing grassy site. There is also the series she made with writer and poet Morty Sklar, Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants), 1972, where she took his facial hair to create a beard on herself. Alongside are works that sit gently in nature, to be later washed away, or where the artist blended her body with the landscape. She was experimenting with gender, identity, physical presence, a love of natural spaces and the ambiguities therein.

There are also many drawings and paintings, previously unseen in London, and a work titled Parachute, made with children that Mendieta taught while working as a primary school teacher.

This show goes some way to replacing myth about Mendieta with fact. It also places the artist alongside the likes of Tracey Emin and Frida Kahlo (also the subjects of Tate Modern exhibitions this summer, Emin until 30 August, Kahlo until 3 January 2027), who have similarly been the focus of much mythmaking, and demonstrates that however much we might know about Mendieta’s life, there is more to learn from her art.

Umansky reflects that the show forms ‘part of the work that the artist’s estate has been doing very meticulously over the last ten years to correct some of the factual errors that were written around [her] work. This is a process that allows for better definition of the works so that they're seen as [if] brand new and in the best possible light.’

‘Ana Mendieta’ at Tate Modern, London, 15 July 2026 to 17 January 2027, tate.org.uk

Nora Chipaumire (styled ‘nora chipaumire’) describes gadzi as an ‘organism’, a term she feels suits it better than ‘installation’. Live performance, sculpture, touch, sound, and moving images share one space, brought to life by people moving through it. ‘My organism holds energy,’ she says, explaining that the work is meant to be experienced physically, through the connection between body and space rather than as an object to view.

Presented as Tate Modern's Infinities Commission 2026, curated by Valentine Umansky and Francis Hardy, gadzi takes its name from gadziguru, the oldest and most powerful feminine presence in Shona cosmology, an indigenous African worldview. Drawing on the legends, stones, and soil of Zimbabwe, the work transforms Tate Modern’s Tanks into an immersive environment where visitors move through sculptural forms, sit on speakers embedded within them, and experience sound physically as it travels. Built from wood, wire, and cardboard, the monumental sculptures give new meaning to everyday materials. Over the past decade, Chipaumire's practice has increasingly focused on the stories and cosmologies of the Shona people, drawing on ancestral knowledge and looking beyond the colonial histories that shaped southern Africa.

Chipaumire rarely separates the physical from the philosophical and almost never speaks about the work as a collection of materials or disciplines. Instead, her work explores memory, landscape, and what it means to remain. At its core, gadzi is shaped by an understanding of the feminine rooted in ancestral belief, moving fluidly between installation and performance to give form to a philosophy that has long existed beyond ‘the very dominant Eurocentric ways in which we try to think about ourselves’.

Chipaumire is not interested in presenting the feminine as a metaphor but as a way of understanding the world, grounded in maturity, lived experience, and knowledge passed across generations. Now 61, she believes gadzi could only have come to life at this point in her career. ‘I'm old enough now to be able to tackle perhaps concerns that are outside of time, and also old enough as a woman to understand what is sacred about the feminine.’ She returns to this phrase almost instinctively, linking age not only to experience but to another way of understanding knowledge itself.

The same refusal to separate ideas from lived experience emerges when the conversation turns to sound. Chipaumire begins with the body: ‘Sound is vibration. It's breath. We are in sound as we breathe, as we speak. Every time we make our voice, and we open our throat, we are in sound, so this is a physical experience.’ Within gadzi, that physicality is carried by a monumental dub sound system embedded throughout the installation. Broadcast through ‘mountains of speaking wood’, the sounds of Chimurenga, both a revolutionary movement and Zimbabwe's celebrated musical tradition, meet the deep bass frequencies of dub. The handmade resonators acknowledge the ingenuity of African and African diasporic approaches to sound technology, where vibration is as significant as melody. ‘To me, sound is physical, is visceral, is the body, is inside of the body.’

Movement, for Chipaumire, is inseparable from sound and the act of listening itself; gadzi is experienced through the body before it is understood intellectually, allowing vibration, movement, and landscape to unfold together. Makeshift lights fashioned from repurposed petrol bottles cast a soft glow across the room, while moving images show the artist navigating the balancing rocks with care. ‘You can walk in and allow your heart to lead,’ she says. ‘This too is the highest form of thinking.’

On view until 23 August 2026, gadzi draws on Zimbabwe's balancing rocks to reflect on the longer histories of colonialism and extraction that continue to shape the present, but the commission refuses to be defined by absence or loss, turning its attention instead to what cannot be taken. ‘There are aspects of us that are not harvestable, that are not extractable, and it is this which I bring into this space. The refusal, the obtuseness to say, “And still we stand, proudly, with elegance.” You could not extract this beauty.’

Here, Chimurenga, literally meaning ‘revolution’, sits alongside dub and punk, allowing different histories of resistance to speak to one another through sound. ‘They are all sounds, different registers, different harmonisations of our collective no. Whether the dub coming from the New World, the Chimurenga coming from the old world, the punk coming from the centre of the so-called Commonwealth, they are all sounds, frequencies, volumes that are saying no.’

A series of live activations animate gadzi further with movement and sound. Tate Modern Lates on 26 June sees the commission spill beyond the East Tank with an evening of music, conversation, film, and workshops, followed by performances on 27 and 28 June. A monumental speaker installation, designed with Ari Marcopoulos and Kara Walker, occupies the Turbine Hall, celebrating the enduring legacy of sound systems within the museum.

Questions of identity give way to questions of power, asking not what it means to be African, Black or female, but how those identities came to exist in the first place. ‘These are constructions,’ she says. ‘We were the first resource to be extracted out of Africa. What is power? Is it the strength to extract and sell others, or is it this truth that we remain?’

Chipaumire is less interested in directing how the work should be read than in inviting audiences to move through it on their own terms, entering what she describes as an ‘energy exchange’ where understanding emerges through participation. ‘All the responsibility,’ she says, when asked what role art can play at a moment marked by displacement, extraction and environmental crisis. ‘The artist is the last intellectual, is the last philosopher who can tackle these issues.’

Frida Kahlo’s reputation precedes her. Even those who aren’t familiar with her work will recognise her ubiquitous portrait, the aura of which has been in danger of eclipsing her work. It is an oversight Tate Modern is keen to rectify with the major new exhibition, ‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’, which pairs Kahlo’s work with that of her contemporaries and later artists, including Kiki Smith, Judy Chicago and Ana Mendieta. The move cements Kahlo’s place in the art canon, and it seems appropriate that an artist so taken over by legend and myth should share exhibition space with those who respect, acknowledge or have been inspired by her.

It is a shame Kahlo’s work has been outshone by her celebrity, as, in its strikingly surreal composition, it is sharply emotive (although Kahlo rejected the surrealist label itself). She created around 150 works in her lifetime, a third of which were self-portraits. More than 30 of these representations are here, tracing the way Kahlo’s self-perception developed, fractured and rebuilt itself throughout her lifetime, running parallel to the health troubles that plagued her.

Born in Mexico City in 1907, Kahlo established an aesthetic entirely her own, after a difficult start that saw her suffer from polio as a child and, later, chronic pain for the remainder of her life following a near-fatal bus crash. It left her fragmented, a sum of her political, physical and spiritual sides that united to create a magnetic private and public persona.

This fluidity takes shape in the portraits in the exhibition, and we vividly see Kahlo secure in her Mexican identity, documenting her experience as a disabled woman, commitment to social activism and influence on LGBTQI+ art.

Despite André Breton’s identification with and deep admiration for the artist – he called her work ‘a ribbon around a bomb’ – Kahlo consistently rejected surrealism, the movement he co-founded, as a definition of her art, arguing her works were rooted in reality, rather than dreams. Still, many works in Tate Modern’s show overlap with the surrealists’ fantastical view of life, intertwining religious motifs and folklore and fraught with natural imagery – from spider monkeys to tangled vines and thorns – symbolising both the endless pain and deep spirituality that accompanied Kahlo throughout her life.

‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’ is at Tate Modern from 25 June 2026 until 3 January 2027, tate.org.uk

‘In a painting, you are presenting the world in front of you. I want to create something that people could enter into in some way,’ says Hurvin Anderson, speaking at the opening of his major retrospective at the Tate Britain.

The exhibition, composed of 80 works and spanning Anderson’s entire career, is long overdue. It marks the first comprehensive survey for the artist, who creates an immersive, atmospheric space in Tate Britain’s classical halls. Works, defined by bold and joyful colour, zigzag between places, memories and motifs, anchored by an almost tangible emotionality.

In 1961, Anderson’s father emigrated to the UK from Jamaica, making Anderson the first member of his family to be born in England. His childhood in Birmingham, where his family settled, is interspersed here with scenes from his time spent in the Caribbean, which he first visited at age 14. Further and frequent visits, including his time as an artist-in-residence in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in 2002, triggered a new focus on lush landscapes.

In the early 1990s, Anderson left Birmingham for London, to attend the Wimbledon College of Art, followed by the Royal College of Art. His early works featured images of family and friends. One of his first series spotlighted Caribbean homes in England, a juxtaposition of cultures he continues to explore.

‘The first time I visited [the Caribbean], I was shocked at just being able to run around and be free somehow, in a way I hadn’t been before,’ he says. In his series of Caribbean-based works, this freedom and joy are translated into vibrant colours, the antithesis of the muted, although beautiful, greys of his paintings that reflect on his childhood in Birmingham. ‘People use colour in a very different way in the Caribbean,’ he says.

Alongside this sense of freedom, Anderson is making sense of his status as an outsider. A Caribbean bar is partly obscured by a red security grille; elsewhere, Jamaican foliage is glimpsed through a beaded curtain. The physical separation becomes a web that spins throughout the complexity of belonging, a thread Anderson unpicks in works where the grille becomes the sole focus. In these works, the grille is reduced to its parts in Cubist-inspired displays that break down its form into purely geometric silhouettes.

‘You feel a kind of energy, in the sense of when you're painting, you are painting yourself into a box in some way,' says Anderson. 'The beaded curtains became me being a bit more playful with this idea of being locked in. What can you do with these motifs? How can you break them down in some way? How can they be yours?’ By devoting canvases solely to the red, white and black grids of these paintngs, Anderson makes them his own. ‘It feels like a playful way to break this thing down, for it to become something else. It's essentially, “don't come in, brothers, beware”, but in terms of painting, you rethink it.’

These motifs populate the work. Anderson is adept at taking symbols, places or details – barbershops, display cabinets, swimming pools – and bringing a poignancy to them. In their specificity, they trigger our own memories. There is something so familiar in the outlines of the building against the grey sky he passed every day on Livingstone Road, infused with that hazy, half-remembered quality. The unreliability of memory, and its revealing relationship with reality, fascinates Anderson.

While Anderson works from photographs most of the time, they are more of a starting point for him, rather than a direct source material for his work. ‘I have a love/hate thing with the photographs. I am probably more at ease with using them now. They are a start, and then you are taking things apart. When you use a photograph, you are almost trying to relive that moment. You're trying to capture something from that moment, or there's something in the photograph that you recognise that even the photograph doesn't have somehow, and you're trying to draw out what you think that is.’

This almost surreal distance occasionally fades into abstraction – faces in his paintings aren’t quite glimpsed in neighbourhood scenes, or bodies on the beach dissolve into abstract symbols. The feeling is remembered, rather than the details.

It is an emotion that crystallises in the last room of the exhibition, where four new works reflect on the activity of rafting, drawing from both Anderson’s memory and historical sources. Anderson cites as inspiration France-born, Jamaica-based lithographer and printer Adolphe Duperly (1801-1864), who captured rafters in a series of anthropological studies. ‘In Jamaica, you go to the tourist team and they might suggest you go rafting. He had this one photograph of a couple going rafting, and it was an interesting moment to see that kind of normality given to this tourist activity. You never think of the people of Jamaica rafting, it is more tourists. It was a reclaiming of this thing, reclaiming some kind of freedom.’

Hurvin Anderson at the Tate Britain, 26 March – 23 August 2026, tate.org.uk

‘At the age of 13 I realised there was a danger in beauty and innocence – I could not have both,’ wrote Tracey Emin (born 1963) in her 1999 short story, Exploration of the Soul. Now these words, framed, hanging in the Tate Modern as part of her largest-ever exhibition, ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’, strike a prophetical tone.

Emin’s influence on contemporary art has been such as to redraw the landscape, yet her works challenge this aura that could have been in danger of eclipsing them. Finally, Emin speaks to us directly through 100 works united here, drawn from throughout her 40-year career. The show is epic in scale. Throughout the mix of media – there is painting, textiles, video, sculptures, neon and installation – Emin returns frequently to the incongruency she noted early on between beauty and innocence, with raw subjects translated into childlike symbols, delicate drawings and joyful colours, or scrawls in neon (‘I could have loved my innocence’).

Emin is ferocious in documenting her life, with a rawness and honesty, going back to her first abortion in 1990, an event she later referred to as an ‘emotional suicide’. It made her realise, she says, that her work before then was a ‘big bunch of crap’. She destroyed it all immediately. It is extraordinary to see, then, a recreation of this early work opening the show. Small photographs of her art-school paintings, framed on stitched fabric, offer a rare glimpse into an artist finding her way.

It’s moving and it’s tough to watch Emin processing her abortion. She is making sense of the jumble of conflicting emotions, as well as its everyday reality. In the 1996 film, How it feels, Emin documents how it feels to have an abortion – useful, she says, for women who are having one, then going into work the next morning, before the fact of it catches up with them. In the film, she stands in the street and discusses her own, turbulent experience. There’s the mundane – getting a cab, choosing what to wear – and the harrowing; the sickness and the fact that, horribly, it doesn’t go to plan.

Mediums are eclectic. Emin writes her CV on paper and documents her year on blankets (‘At the age of 13 why the hell should I trust anyone’ she appliqués in 1999). In 1994, she embroiders: ‘There’s a lot of money in chairs’ on the armchair she inherited from her great-grandmother, after her nan made the comment. Her nan meant that people stuffed money down the back of them.

In her blankets and armchairs, Emin questions the artistic integrity of quilt-making, imbuing the medium in her compositions with the gravity of paintings. The layered, textured quilts, with their bright colours and spontaneous thoughts, are the most joyful part of the show. Elsewhere, she looks beyond the expected for her next canvas; famously, it is on a bed where Emin documents her recovery from an alcohol-fuelled breakdown, with the Turner Prize-nominated My Bed, from 1998, closing the chapter of Emin’s ‘first life’.

Emin’s second life begins with her documenting cancer, surgery and disability. Seen for the first time here are new photographs of her stoma, following her major surgery for bladder cancer. Emin’s unflinching photographs of herself after her operation are vital works, an urgent dismissal of the coy and occasionally dangerous secrecy with which the body is handled. It's hard not to look away, but it's important you don't.

To follow these raw photographs with the series of beautiful, spiritual, large-scale paintings Emin created after her operation, as well as the monumental bronze outside, I Followed You Until The End, 2023, serves to anchor the exhibition, and Emin, in the present. Juxtapositions still reign, but in the gritty, bloody reality of living, Emin celebrates the beauty of being alive.

‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life’ at the Tate Modern, in partnership with Gucci, from 26 February – 30 August 2026, tate.org.uk

It was 1975 that American workwear brand Carhartt, known for a rugged sensibility which has since been adopted by subcultures the world over, first introduced its Active Jacket, a hooded zip-up in reinforced canvas made to protect against the elements – whether on construction site or skate park.

For the half-decade that has followed, the Active Jacket has remained in production, appearing in various forms, including a 1997 version by Carhartt WIP, the Europe-based sub-brand which takes Carhartt’s heavy-duty silhouettes and reimagines them in lighter, more refined fabrications and fits (albeit retaining the sturdy, utilitarian feel of the originals). It is this version, the ‘OG Active Jacket’, which has since become ubiquitous, appearing in canvas, stone-washed denim, leather and sweater jersey iterations, and worn by everyone from skaters and style-conscious urbanites to off-duty Hollywood stars.

On Thursday evening (6 November 2025), Carhartt WIP took over the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Tanks in London’s Tate Modern – the converted subterranean oil tanks of the former power plant which now houses the contemporary art institution – with a celebratory installation, created in collaboration with Thomas Subreville’s ‘post-disciplinary’ practice ILL-STUDIO. Taking the idea of excavation at its heart, the project was titled ‘Sedimental Works’ – a reference to the idea of sifting through the layers of the Active Jacket’s history (an accompanying book of the same name will also be released).

As such, the quarry-like mise-en-scène – complete with hulking columns of ‘rock’ which interplayed with the existing concrete architecture – evoked a site in mid-excavation, with Subreville and his team exploring the idea that associations can accumulate around a garment over time. ‘I was interested in how a functional object can become a cultural register, something that transcends its function and begins to absorb its own afterlife,’ Subreville explains to Wallpaper*, saying that the project has been a natural extension of his interrogation of ideas of ‘objecthood, context, and perception’ in his work so far.

‘From the beginning, I wanted to avoid nostalgia,’ he continues. ‘The idea was not to celebrate a product but to look at the jacket as an open document of personal identity and collective symbolism, a fixed form in a constantly shifting world.’ As such, the ‘forward-minded retrospective’ instead took a more fragmentary form, with sound, video and a series of live performances unfolding across the evening, including a set from Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter Erika de Casier.

The Tanks, which were opened to the public in 2012 after an extensive renovation, felt like an apt setting for the ‘spatial geography’ of the installation, says Subreville, who wanted to echo the space’s austerity. ‘They already feel like an excavation, a space carved out of time, both archaeological and contemporary. There is a strong resonance between the industrial past of Tate Modern and the origin of the Active Jacket. Both were born from utility, and later absorbed into culture as symbols.’ The goal, he continues, is to ‘not to tell people what to see, but to let them excavate their own associations’.

Of his own associations with the Active Jacket – which, alongside the collared ’Detroit’ jacket and the carpenter pant, remains one of Carhartt WIP’s most lucrative exports – Subreville thinks it represents ‘a kind of shared uniform’, regardless of ’age, gender, or background’. ‘Everyone has their own version of it, whether literal or symbolic, a piece that gathers traces of work, weather, culture, and time,’ he says. ‘Whether you are a 55-year-old worker or a 16-year-old teenager, it becomes what you need it to be. It is not about design; it is about context.’

carhartt-wip.com

Stepping into Tate Modern, the proposition is immediate: modernism is plural and Nigeria is one of its centres. ‘Nigerian Modernism’ opens as a conversation, not a line. Media and generations collide. Ceramics answer painting. Print meets sculpture. Osei Bonsu and Bilal Akkouche curate with a choreography that mirrors the experimental drive of the work itself. Opening tomorrow, the exhibition brings together more than 250 works by over 50 artists, spanning the 1940s through to the late 20th century. What emerges is not a tidy lineage but a restless dialogue – a testing ground for freedom, imagination, and struggle.

By the time Nigeria gained independence in 1960, a generation of artists had already begun to craft a new visual vocabulary that challenged colonial hierarchies and asserted cultural pride. The exhibition maps this shift as both a personal and collective journey. It opens in the 1940s, in the early stirrings of decolonisation, when British governance still shaped Nigeria’s education system, and many artists left to study in Britain. They absorbed European methods, yet their ambitions lay elsewhere: to centre Indigenous forms, to wrest back sovereignty, to place Nigerian art within the broader story of modernism on its own terms.

The gallery vibrates with atmosphere. Paintings, sculptures and prints are accompanied by the soundscapes of Lagos, threaded through by a playlist curated by Peter Adjaye. The rhythms call up the city’s nightclubs at their height and, more deeply, the transatlantic journeys that carried diasporic traditions back to West Africa. Out of those returns came highlife, a genre born of fusion: part memory, part invention, a cultural lingua franca that transcended borders. To hear its pulse inside the museum is to understand that Nigerian modernism is not only a visual project but a sonic and social one, alive with political consciousness.

Walking through the exhibition, one is struck by a sense of beauty that has been missing from London’s cultural landscape. Until now, the city’s relationship to African modernism has been mediated by the art market, with Bonhams among the few institutions to establish a global profile for modern and contemporary African art. Here, however, the works are liberated from the auction room. They appear as stories and legacies, as textures of belonging. The galleries feel almost domestic, familiar in palette and rhythm, resonant in sound. It is as though an untold history, long at the margins, has been waiting for this moment to announce itself.

The exhibition’s final act centres on Uzo Egonu, an artist who spent much of his life in Britain and whose Stateless People series from the 1980s is reunited here for the first time in four decades. His solitary figures – a musician, an artist, a writer – are both portraits and archetypes, reflections on displacement and the unstable search for belonging. Egonu demonstrates that Nigerian modernism did not end with independence or the trauma of civil war. It continues in the diaspora, in the friction between memory and exile, in the act of carrying fragments of home into other worlds. Though later embraced by the British Black Arts Movement, Egonu refused neat categorisation, insisting on a radically independent practice that secured his position as one of the most important Nigerian artists in the global diaspora.

Throughout, Bonsu and Akkouche resist the comfort of chronology. Instead, they stage connections: Lagos to Zaria, Ibadan to Nsukka, London to Munich and Paris. The exhibition moves like a web, tracing networks between practice, medium and geography. History is kept alive, not pinned down. The curators argue persuasively that Nigerian artists are not adjuncts to modernism but its engine, its rhythm, its core.

What emerges is not a monolith but a chorus. Experiments collide. Traditions are bent and reshaped. Local knowledge is folded into international form. The questions raised are pressing, not past tense. How does a nation narrate itself after an empire? How can inheritance circulate globally without being consumed? What would it mean for museums to write histories that hold multiplicity and mastery together, without compromise?

The rooms themselves thrum with tactility. Ceramic vessels incised with geometric skin. Prints thick with relief. Canvases alive with heat and procession. Objects sit in deliberate proximity, sparking visual conversations: a Kwali pot beside an Enwonwu canvas, an Onobrakpeya relief catching light near an Egonu geometry, reading tables scattered with Black Orpheus and other journals that once shaped cultural debate. The rhythm of the exhibition encourages slow looking, drift and return. Eight rooms hold half a century of work, carrying us from the euphoric pulse of independence to the quieter registers of reckoning, resistance and renewal.

To walk through ‘Nigerian Modernism’ is to encounter art as inheritance: ancestral forms carried forward, reshaped, made new. It is also to see artists holding a mirror to the nation, reflecting not only vitality but also fracture. History here is not offered as a fixed account but as a sequence of encounters – between continents, between generations, between tradition and innovation.

At its core, ‘Nigerian Modernism’ does more than fill a gap in the canon; it rewrites the canon altogether. Each room reveals how artists turned knowledge into action, technique into language, art into infrastructure. They built schools, founded clubs, created forms the world had never seen. Their project was not about style, but about freedom.

The lesson is inescapable. These are not decorative footnotes to history. They are history. They bear the burden of responsibility, the devotion to skill, the urgency of a nation imagining itself anew. To leave the exhibition is to leave instructed, altered, unable to look away.

‘Nigerian Modernism’ is at Tate Modern, London from 8 October 2025 to 10 May 2026, tate.org.uk

A sequinned showcase

Gabriel Annouka, Senior Designer

For my good friends Cristiano and Paul’s seventeenth anniversary, I took them to the Leigh Bowery retrospective at Tate Modern – my third visit and now my unofficial Sunday service. Cristiano, a drag queen from Brazil, was instantly enchanted, seeing part of his own world reflected and expanded; Paul, who lived in London during Bowery’s era, filled in the stories behind the spectacle.

I still get emotional. Platform boots and glitter-armoured bodysuits lifted our spirits as I devoured every leaflet, promo image and piece of printed archive ephemera, especially the visuals for dancer and choreographer Michael Clark’s productions. Finally seeing excerpts of Charles Atlas’s film Hail the New Puritan (1985-6) and Clark’s Because We Must (1989), with Bowery’s costumes alive in motion, was a revelation. What strikes me each time I see the show is how many of these works came from a circle of mostly young queer creatives – fearless, outrageous and unreasonably inventive. Bowery isn’t just remembered here. He’s alive, sequins and all.

A Scandinavian sojourn

Anna Solomon, Digital Staff Writer

This weekend, I’m popping back to my home from home: Stockholm, where I decamped for a year in my early twenties rather than getting a job. Punishing during winter, there’s nothing like Stockholm in the summer: sprawling days, honey-hued architecture, swims in the archipelago. I'll be checking out Kulturfestivalen (that’s ‘culture festival’ for the polyglots among you) – a five-day celebration of art, music and dance (free, of course – this is Scandinavia) – and staying in an apartment courtesy of Kindred, an up-and-coming home-swapping app that recently listed designer Gustaf Westman’s postmodern-inspired home in the Swedish capital.

A dream workspace

Rosa Bertoli, Global Design Director

As this week I am keeping in touch with the Wallpaper* team virtually, I found hospitality in an Italian office while I wait for my summer holidays to begin. For someone as passionate about design as I am, this temporary location is a dream, full to the brim with Italian workspace classics, including Olivetti typewriters, Michele de Lucchi lamps for Artemide, and colourful Zenith staplers. I am particularly enjoying these Solari Time Keepers (pictured) – made by the local company that first patented the flip clock mechanism and created by architect Gino Valle, these 1960s designs are still going strong (and working beautifully) today.

An urban adventure

Anna Fixsen, US Editor

For me, summer means two things: my apartment gets a single splotch of sunlight, and my Saturday mornings are eaten up by marathon training. Those who know me are well-aware of my annual 26.2-mile quest and understand that my Friday nights are not spent whooping it up at my local, but downing a preternatural amount of pasta and nervously plotting out all the public restrooms along my route.

One of the most incredible public programs in New York is its annual Summer Streets, in which vast stretches of avenues and boulevards throughout the five boroughs are completely open to pedestrians, runners and cyclists on select weekends. This year, the city’s made a whopping 400 blocks car-free, meaning my training routes these last two weeks have taken me nearly the entire length of Manhattan, from the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, through canyons of Midtown skyscrapers and into vibrant stretches of Harlem, Morningside Heights and beyond. This Saturday marks the final Manhattan tour, but you can scope out open streets in Brooklyn and the Bronx on August 23. If you see me suffering on my 19-miler this weekend, please hand me a Gatorade. A high-five will also do the trick.

A jazz legend

Melina Keays, Entertaining Director

I’ve been soaking up the atmosphere at Ronnie Scott’s. If ever a London venue owned the term ‘legendary’, this Soho jazz club does. I am always a little apprehensive about living a legend in case reality falls short of reputation, but fear not – any such apprehensions evaporated from the moment of arrival. All my Ronnie Scott’s expectations were met and exceeded. It’s all there to be seen, heard and enjoyed – the velvet banquette seating, the little red table lamps, attentive table service, the smoky stage (dry ice, not cigarettes these days) and of course, the authentic, moody, mesmerising jazz.

A studio stop-by

Hannah Silver, Art, Culture, Watches & Jewellery Editor

I’ve long admired Henni Alftan’s distinctive portrayal of everyday love rendered in flat and figurative planes, which lend an unsettling otherness to everyday scenes. It was a pleasure, then, to visit her in her studio this week ahead of her exhibition, 'By the Skin of My Teeth', next month at Sprüth Magers, Berlin.

A Californian summer

Charlotte Gunn, Director of Digital Content

I'm back from Los Angeles where I typically spend a good chunk of the summer. This year's highlights included browsing designer vintage at The Curatorial Dept (I'm still thinking about an Issey Miyake two-piece I left on the shelf), indulging in crab beignets at opulent Hollywood restaurant The Benjamin, relying on tattoo artist Sean From Texas to add more ridiculous ink to my arm and watching 80s classic The Lost Boys under a full moon in the Hollywood Forever cemetery. The city's going through some tough times but the people remain resilient.

Twenty-five years after its opening, Tate Modern, London’s museum of modern and contemporary art on the Southbank, continues to captivate audiences. Renowned as one of the most engaging and accessible institutions of its kind, Tate Modern has redefined what an art museum can be in the 21st century.

This weekend (9-12 May), the museum is feting its 25th anniversary in style, with an epic Birthday Weekender of art, shopping, music and more. Here are the free exhibitions and events to check out at the Tate Modern this weekend.

See incredible artworks for free

The public can enjoy free installations and performances over the weekend. Louise Bourgeois' 10m-tall bronze spider sculpture, Maman, which welcomed the museum’s first visitors in May 2000, will return to the Turbine Hall, and Roman Ondak's interactive artwork, Measuring the Universe, invites visitors to mark their height on the Turbine Hall wall for an evolving exhibition.

A trail of 25 significant and symbolic artworks – both classics and new acquisitions – will guide visitors through the museum. Highlights include Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals, Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, an immersive multi-screen film installation by Nalini Malani, and a series of live tarot readings staged as part of Meschac Gaba’s installation.

Tate Collective members aged 16-25, meanwhile, can gain free entry to all current Tate Modern exhibitions, including Leigh Bowery!, Electric Dreams, Anthony McCall: Solid Light, and The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh.

Two new free exhibitions have also opened in time for the museum’s birthday, reflecting its forward-looking commitment. ‘A Year in Art: 2050’ explores how artists have envisioned possible futures, while ‘Gathering Ground’ delves into the connections between contemporary art, land and community at a time of ecological crises.

Dance the night –and day– away

What's a party without incredible music? As part of the Birthday Weekender, the museum is inviting the public to attend a series of day and evening music performances.

Tonight, BBC Radio 1 DJ Jaguar and Romy will headline the Tanks. If you missed out, there's still plenty to see: Saturday, catch performances by Crystallmess, DAYTIMERS and Queer Bruk, as well as a headliner set by CULTURE FM in the museum's Tanks.

Sunday, beginning at noon, you can drop in as DJ House of Dad performs a chill afternoon set.

Indulge in retail therapy

Uniqlo, a long-time partner of the Tate, has just unveiled a special, pocket-size 'gift shop' on the museum's ground floor. Here you can find fashion and accessories inspired by works in the museum's collection, like t-shirts featuring an Andy Warhol self-portrait, Guerilla Girls' 1986 ‘Dearest Art Collector’ , and an illustration of the Tate itself by Peter Saville. The store also features fun customisation stations, where fashionistas can get their duds upgraded with bespoke embroidery.

Catch a talk

The Birthday Weekender will also encompass adjacent events, such as panel discussions with Tate Modern’s director, Karin Hindsbo; chief curator, Catherine Wood; as well as artists in the museum's Starr Cinema.

The museum will hold creative coding workshops, community conversations, and interactive Make Studios. You can also join Pop-up Ten Minute Talks; British Sign Language and audio description tours; and workshops by Kazvare Made in the Uniquo Tate Shop.

This weekend (9-12 May), Tate Modern hosts a celebratory ‘birthday weekender’ to mark 25 years of the London institution, which opened at the turn of the millennium after a nearly six-year conversion of the former Bankside Power Station, which was inaugurated in the early 1960s and closed in 1982 after surging oil prices.

Over the quarter decade since, it has become a site of numerous blockbuster exhibitions and installations, not least in the vast turbine hall which has been transformed by the works of Carsten Höller (looping stories-high slides), Louise Bourgeois (towering metal spiders) and Ai Weiwei (hundreds of thousands of porcelain sunflower seeds), among others. The time has also seen various expansions and renovations, including the subterranean ‘Tanks’ (2012) and the towering Blavatnik Building (2016), both designed by Swiss studio Herzog & de Meuron.

25 years of Tate Modern: Uniqlo opens its take on the gift shop

Amid the various celebrations taking place over the weekend – which span an eclectic programme, from tarot readings to performance art, talks and DJ sets – is the opening of a playful take on the museum gift shop by Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo, a longtime sponsor of Tate Modern’s various events, including ‘Tate Lates’ which ran from 2016-2020.

Located on the riverside ground floor, ‘Uniqlo Tate Shop, Art For All’ – named after Uniqlo’s ongoing support programme for various art institutions, including MoMA, the Louvre and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts – will feature a typically colourful array of Uniqlo staples, displayed on curving fixtures in the brand’s signature signal-red hue (at 100 sq m, think of it as a Uniqlo store in miniature).

The store will also feature a range of T-shirts featuring an era-spanning collection of art works from the Tate’s collection – a playful take on gift shop ‘merch’ – including a 1979 self-portrait by Andy Warhol, Guerrilla Girls’ 1986 ‘Dearest Art Collector’ and a Peter Saville illustration of Tate Modern, alongside works by Louise Bourgeois, Salvador Dalí, Ayoung Kim and Ibrahim El-Salahi, among others.

But Uniqlo also designates the store as a place of ‘play’: customisation stations will allow garments to be personalised with embroidered motifs, while a series of workshops will unfold over the weekend and across the month. ‘Tate Modern’s birthday isn’t just a moment to reflect on 25 years at the cutting edge,’ says Karin Hindsbo, director of Tate Modern. ‘It’s a chance to keep pushing artistic boundaries and to give a platform to the next generation.’

‘Our birthday weekend will be a truly public celebration of art and creativity to which everyone is invited,’ she continues. ‘We are incredibly grateful to our longstanding partner, Uniqlo, for their support of the Birthday Weekender, reflecting our shared values and belief that art is for everyone.’

‘Uniqlo Tate Shop, Art For All’ is open now until 16 September, 2025. Tate’s ‘Birthday Weekender’ programme can be viewed here.

uniqlo.com

From 12-16 June 2025, the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt will be displayed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. The quilt is thought to be one of the largest community arts projects ever, and is a fascinating piece of social history, comprising 42 quilts that commemorate 384 individuals affected by HIV and AIDS.

The idea was originated by activist Cleve Jones in the US in 1985. People were invited to create textile panels commemorating loved ones lost to AIDS, which were sewn together into quilts. These were often used during protests, where the names embroidered on the panels would be read out.

Inspired by a display he saw in San Francisco, Scottish activist Alistair Hulme began a UK version of the quilt project in the late-1980s. This blossomed into the ‘Quilts of Love’ display at Hyde Park Corner in 1994, which showcased panels from the US and the UK with contributions from fashion designers.

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt consists of 42 panels, each containing up to eight smaller panels, embroidered with testimonials, photos, documents and other tributes to individuals affected by HIV and AIDS, including prominent figures such as writer Bruce Chatwin and actor Ian Charleson. For many years, it remained in storage and faced the threat of deterioration, leading to the formation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt Conservation Partnership, which is presenting the quilt at Tate Modern.

Although effective drug treatments for HIV now exist, meaning that people with the virus can live long and healthy lives, access to these medications remains uneven and global communities continue to be impacted by the pandemic. The quilt serves as a reminder of this, as well as a way of commemorating those lost and combating the stigma still associated with HIV and AIDS. In being displayed at Tate Modern, the quilt will reach its biggest audience yet. Additionally, two live readings of the names on the quilt will take place on 14 June at 11am and 2pm, in the tradition of the protests where the quilts originated.

Siobhán Lanigan from the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Conservation Partnership has said: ‘The purpose of our partnership is to have the quilt seen as often as possible in as many places as possible… With every viewing, the names and the lives of all the people commemorated and all those who could not be named are recognised, celebrated and brought out of the shadow of the stigma that is still associated with an HIV diagnosis today.’

Tate Modern’s director, Karin Hindsbo, has described the quilt as ‘an incredible feat of creative human expression’ and said that visitors will find it ‘a deeply moving experience’.

tate.org.uk
aidsquiltuk.org

The artist is semi-present in Ed Atkins’ unnerving new show at Tate Britain (‘Ed Atkins’, 2 April – 25 August 2025). He is represented by digital avatars, his voice providing a surreal, delirious soundtrack. In Piano Work 2 (2023), the British artist’s actual form is recreated using motion capture technology as he plays Jürg Frey’s ‘Klavierstuck 2’, but the most recognisable body belongs to an everyman avatar purchased some years ago for $100, who has been used repeatedly through his videos.

‘It’s big, oppressive and slightly uncomfortable,’ Atkins says of the show, which surveys 15 years. Alongside the large-screen videos are drawings and text pieces, as well as a pair of eerie, undulating beds. One blood-red drawing features the artist’s head attached to a spider’s body.

The video screens are backed with embroideries, merging technology with handcrafting. Visitors weave through an imposing installation of previously worn opera costumes on high rails, which create a stark contrast between the physically tangible and digital, while offering a different kind of stand-in for the body. His early work saw Atkins aligned with the boom of post-internet artists, but it feels as though technology is more a means through which to explore his ideas than the main subject of his practice.

‘My work isn’t really about the digital, it’s how we see ourselves through the contemporary moment,’ he says. ‘What technologies, at any given time, whether painting, photography or writing, strain at the leash of self-representation?’ He constantly prods at the limits of existence and essence. Do our likenesses define who we are? Or our thoughts, feelings, and words. Perhaps another thing entirely. ‘No one could use this show to know who I am, but that’s also testament to the fact that even I don’t really know who I am,’ he says, reflecting on his art – and new experimental memoir Flowers – as an ‘anti-heroisation of life’.

The theme of death is ever-present. Sometimes, this is highly personal. The two-hour film Nurses Come and Go, but None for Me (2024) features actor Toby Jones reading diaries written by Atkins’ father following his cancer diagnosis. ‘A symptom in contemporary Western cultures is trying not to think about death, but then it becomes this terrible, awful shock when it does happen,’ says Atkins. His father’s diaries represent a form of processing death as it happens, and during his lifetime, these writings were available for the family to read.

‘The fantasy is that we’ll be the ones who escape death,’ says Atkins. ‘In a way, my dad’s gift in writing this diary is to share something that is very difficult but also universal.’ While works such as this reflect directly on death as a theme – Hisser (2015), a three-screen video earlier in the exhibition, was inspired by a man who disappeared when a giant sinkhole opened under his house and consumed him in bed – the medium itself is also inherently interwoven with mortality.

Atkins describes the digital avatars representing a form of death, attempting to look like or be a person but failing. They are blatantly unalive, missing a specific humanness that is difficult to recreate. ‘There are parts of being a person that can’t be taken by representational technology,’ he says. This is heightened by the melancholy that permeates the work. ‘Even if death itself is unavailable as a thing to properly feel or think about, you’re getting close to it with the sense of a loss [in the work] that you can’t name.’

This melancholy is balanced with a lightness that hasn’t been so present in previous shows. ‘There is some joy,’ Atkins tells me, reflecting on the mass of Post-It-note drawings on show that he drew for his daughter during the pandemic. While a palpable nihilism has always run through his pieces, this is countered by a new, paternal warmth. ‘The missing element’ in his works was the ‘straightforward love and joy’ that differs from the emotional ambiguity that characterises many of his pieces. ‘It’s not complicated because it’s attached to the love of my children.’

‘Ed Atkins’ is at Tate Britain, London, 2 April – 25 August 2025, tate.org.uk

Check out more new London art exhibitions to see this month

Tate has announced its programme for 2026, and it's going to be a blockbuster year for art in London and beyond, with a particular focus on women artists. Arguably the highlight of the 2026 exhibition calendar will be a Frida Kahlo exhibition at Tate Modern, titled ‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’, which will open on 25 June 2026 and run until early January 2027.

The exhibition will explore Kahlo’s life and legacy through more than 130 works, including her iconic self-portraits, showcasing the Mexican artist's signature vibrant style.

‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’ will also exhibit rarely seen documents, photographs and memorabilia from Kahlo's archives, shedding light on the different shades of her life and character: Kahlo the political activist, the intellectual, the wife. (A 2018 exhibition

Through artworks and objects, audiences will dive deep into the life and career of Kahlo, whose folk-style art explored themes of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class and race, often incorporating autobiographical and fantastical elements. Although she died in 1954, her work wasn’t adopted by the mainstream until the 1970s; Kahlo is now a recognised and celebrated figure in art history as well as the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements. The exhibition will also touch upon the diversity of communities who claim Kahlo as their own.

‘Frida: The Making of an Icon’ will also bring together art from more than 80 of the artist’s contemporaries, as well as work by artists from later generations who were inspired by Kahlo, broadening the scope of the exhibition to consider the role of women artists in the 20th century.

Tate’s 2026 programme will also include a landmark Tracey Emin retrospective, which will include the Turner Prize-nominated installation, My Bed. There will also be stagings of Argentine artist Julio Le Parc and Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, as well as a photography exhibition, ‘Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography’.

tate.org.uk

‘Leigh Bowery!’ at Tate Modern is a groundbreaking show for a number of reasons. Through the lens of the legendary performance artist, muse and designer (1961-1994), we see the emergence and impact of a small but mighty subculture that left an impression on the UK cultural landscape, still in evidence today.

The exhibition covers Bowery’s life once he arrived in the UK from Australia, in 1980. He had, while working in Burger King, seen an advertisement for Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World contest, a legendary queer beauty pageant and art extravaganza. It was here he found his tribe in the New Romantics and pushed this scene’s boundaries both within club culture in London (as celebrated in ‘Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London’ at the capital’s Fashion and Textile Museum) and as a public figure.

Tate Modern’s new exhibition (27 February – 31 August 2025) covers Bowery’s impact on both mainstream and subculture, looking at his personal life and work through the spaces in which he thrived – the home, the club, the studio and the street. Uniting he film and art created about and around him and his own work, the exhibition reveals the fun and the struggle of living an alternative life in the 1980s.

Curator Fiontán Moran worked on the exhibition with Bowery’s widow and artistic partner Nicole Rainbird, who holds Bowery’s estate, and the collaboration was a close one.

‘Fiontán came around to my house and looked through boxes and boxes of photographs and archival material… and all the costumes,’ says Rainbird. ‘He just sat there photographing everything and formulated his ideas.’

Displays are drenched in sequins and filled with glittered gimp masks, neck corsets, hilarious, sexy postcards, and personal items like a homemade stacked trainer. The exhibition is a true window into Bowery’s practice and his circle, which included choreographer Michael Clark, Boy George, Trojan, Princess Julia and Charles Atlas. Their party scene, which centred on Bowery’s own club night Taboo, and venues such as The Cha-Cha Club and the famous Blitz Club, was notorious for its alt-glamour, bitchy barbs and hedonism. It was all about the getting ready and having a striking and unique look of your own creation.

‘I thought it was important to look at someone that contributed a great deal to art and culture at the time, but also beyond, [to] make a show that I hope connects to people’s everyday experience of the city and being creative,’ said Moran.

We see enlarged busts, contorting costumes, obscured faces and highlighted genitals – everything exaggerated and covered with patterns and spots that are thought by some to allude to the lesions associated with AIDS. There is a horror-glamour and aggressive rejection of norms in the work of Bowery and his friends that is palpably exciting.

The show starts with a focus on the home, Bowery’s flat and his early ideas. Charles Atlas’ fictional documentary on Michael Clark, Hail the New Puritan, 1986, specifically shows everyone getting ready to go out. This is seen alongside John Maybury’s film about Bowery, Read Only Memory, 1989, included to provide context of the times. This was Thatcher’s Britain, a time of inequity, government-level homophobia, and the AIDS crisis.

This helps explain the rebelliousness of this group of artists, who met when Clark saw Bowery in a club and asked him to create costumes for his performances. Clark was pushing the boundaries of acceptability in contemporary dance and Bowery’s costumes brought an edge to already controversial performances.

‘The Michael Clark ballets were really heavily criticised,’ Rainbird recalls. ‘And [people] did not like Leigh being part of the performance. It was because it wasn’t conventional. I suppose it was outside the box. And, you know, I think they just felt that ballet should be a particular way. I think they felt that what Leigh introduced was more pantomime.’

Rainbird also notes that people outside traditional dance would come to the performances in order to attend the after-parties, which were a thing of urban myth.

Today, of course, Clark is a revered presence on the cultural scene and applauded for combining disciplines and ideas. He is just one example of the famous figures who collaborated with Bowery, albeit one of the most prolific. Throughout the Tate Modern show, there is work from other artists, including Jeffery Hinton and Dick Jewel. There is also a deep exploration of the queer club scene of the 1980s, which is peppered with famous faces and nightlife legends, such as John Galliano, Jalle Bakke and Marc Vaultier. There are also photographs by an emerging Nick Knight and clips from TV classic The Clothes Show.

‘I think in terms of looking at contemporary art, the creative scene and landscape, that period continues to be an inspiration, especially when you think [Bowery] did a lot of these performances and made a lot of these garments for very meagre [gains],’ says Moran.

There are several works on show by Lucian Freud, who painted Bowery and his friend the writer Sue Tilley. Freud continued to paint Bowery up until his death, and this friendship helped push the latter towards the contemporary art world, creating acceptability outside club land and pop culture. Freud’s paintings are juxtaposed with the outré performances Bowery was making at the time, but also with the creeping of the commercial world into subculture.

Bowery’s first performance in a gallery setting – at the D’Offay Gallery, in 1988 – put him on a trajectory into the contemporary art world that we will never see completed, but Rainbird thinks he would have liked to make some proper money and would never have settled on a genre.

‘Leigh Bowery!’ tells the story of a time through the life of one of its brightest stars and his circle, but it also hints at the essence of a man who lived his life performing, whether this was on stage at Saddler’s Wells or just popping to the shops.

‘Leigh Bowery!’ is at Tate Modern, London, 27 February – 31 August 2025, tate.org.uk

Also catch ‘Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London’ at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London, until 9 March 2025

While artists have long worked at the intersection of theatre, fashion, performance, activism and film, to name a few mediums, it’s a cultural shapeshifting that is often sidestepped by the traditional exhibition format. Recently, however, as fluidity is increasingly celebrated, institutions and spaces are unveiling the chameleonic nature of the artist, something the Tate Modern has demonstrated to brilliant effect with its programming in 2024 and 2025.

Recent exhibitions, such as last year’s ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’, the current ‘Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit’, and the upcoming ‘Leigh Bowery!’, have included works across a broader context. Three different artists working in three different mediums, Ono, Kelley and Bowery are united by their fascination with other worlds beyond the narrow confines of art, which take shape in their work through ritual and conversation. Specifically, threads are woven together through the lens of music, which also becomes a way of connecting the community.

Watch: Hannah Silver on a year in art and culture, and the trend behind Tate Modern’s award win

‘All three artists have roots in music subculture and performance,’ says Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s director of programme. ‘Part of what I’m trying to do with the Tate Modern programme is to make space for the kinds of art-making that have been excluded from the mainstream canon, but which have a real influence on younger artists today, who often think much more openly about the flow between music, art, fashion and activism.’ Wood points out that it is traditionally Western narratives that have formalised a separation between art, dance, theatre and music – something she is keen to address.

We saw this integration in the Yoko Ono show, which explored the eclectic facets in her work through the channels of instruction, performance and film, a radical entry into her world of participatory art. Creating this immersive world was also crucial for Mike Kelley, whose dark pop art comes to life in experimental multimedia installations flicking between the spiritual, the uncanny and the sinister. Leigh Bowery, too, forged his own way through an array of mediums, with his clothing, make-up and performance art directing the gaze back to the body, which itself becomes a tool, situated in a space that could be a club or a gallery.

‘It’s interesting because each of these artists had a connection to pop artists who were more well-known than they were,’ adds Wood. ‘Mike Kelley with Sonic Youth, Leigh Bowery with Boy George, and Yoko Ono with John Lennon. But despite this proximity to fame, and creative exchange with those individuals, each of them was, in different ways, inspired by processes of composition, collaboration and “jamming” that come from a musical experience: whether being in a noise band [Mike Kelley], mastering the classical piano [Yoko Ono] or organising a club night or performing in a drag band [Bowery].’

These artists, working in the late-20th century and into the 21st, championed the subversive subcultures of the music that inspired them, reacting against earlier ideas that dictated music must be enjoyed in its pure form only. Here, music is more than a sound, but rather encompasses the aesthetics of everything around it, a winning formula for the freer, non-binary agenda of the future.

‘Music creates a kind of architecture that allows us to experience the passing of time in an aesthetic way,’ says Wood. ‘This is something that has inspired artists and choreographers particularly, because it enables them to create sequences of images, or moving images, that we can experience through duration. With these shows, we’re bringing subcultural activities – performance, sound, activism – to light in a new way. It feels relevant to what our audiences are interested in today.’

‘Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit’ is on show until 9 March 2025; ‘Leigh Bowery!’ is on show from 27 February-31 August 2025, both at Tate Modern, London SE1

tate.org.uk

The February 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 9 January 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Today, digital art as we know it is dizzyingly immersive, drawing from optical and kinetic references in its creation of uncanny other worlds. It’s a movement that has been gathering steam for decades, the roots of which are now being uncovered in a major new exhibition at the Tate Modern.

Encompassing the period from the 1950s to the beginning of the internet era, and uniting over 70 artists, Electric Dreams celebrates vintage tech art in all its mind-bending glory. From US artist Rebecca Allen’s experiments in motion capture and 3D modelling for a Krafwerk music video, to Eduardo Kac’s text poems created with Minitel machines, the exhibition delves into movements including kineticism, cybernetics and abstraction as they began to take shape.

Here, too, are the beginnings of virtual reality, with Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss’s 1992 interactive installation inviting visitors to distort their reflection on a pool of digital water. Meanwhile, Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz Diez’s trippy moving projections invite us into a maze of coloured lines, taking a disorientating deep-dive into the impact of science on art.

‘Electric Dreams’ will be on show from 28 November-1 June at Tate Modern, London

tate.org.uk

A version of this article appears in the December 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands from 7 of November, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

To mark the expanded reissue of Aphex Twin’s iconic 1994 album ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II’, London-based label Warp Records announces a free listening event at Tate Modern on 25 October.

Released on the 4th of October to celebrate its 30th anniversary, ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition)’ draws on lucid dreaming and synesthesia to explore the resonant sounds of a power station. Through beatless arrangements and textured compositions, Aphex Twin orchestrates a sonic journey that is by turns beautiful, nightmarish, emotive, and thrilling. The album has received widespread acclaim, with leading music magazines like Pitchfork ranking it as the second-best ambient album of all time.

The reissue is available as a 4-LP set, a 3-CD set, and a deluxe 4-LP box edition, containing all 25 original tracks plus two extras. The deluxe edition is a collector’s piece, featuring a fold-out poster, a sticker sheet, and a booklet detailing the artwork development process by designer Paul Nicholson. Each copy is uniquely crafted, presented in a hinged oak case with an etched copper plate.

The listening party will be hosted in the South Tank of the Blavatnik Building from 18:00 to 21:30, as part of the ‘Tate Lates’ program. While the event is free of charge, advance booking is required; tickets will be available from 14:00 on the Tate website on the day of the event.

This collaboration between Warp Records and Tate Modern not only celebrates a milestone in electronic music but also underscores the enduring synergy between sound and visual art—a fusion that lies at the heart of Aphex Twin’s work.

At every show across the world, the gallery attendant is on permanent display. They are, along with their functional chair, as much a part of the furniture of the art gallery as its meticulously positioned frames or silent white walls. Since the invention of the exhibition, these workers have kept a close eye on the works that surround them, handed out literature, offered visitors impromptu art history lessons and ensured that Do Not Touch signs are adhered to.

Or not adhered to, perhaps. After all, in recent years, climate activists have glued themselves to displays, as well as launched a Warholian tin of tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and slashed ancient masterpieces. Elsewhere, a banana on display worth £90,000 was eaten and an 18ct gold toilet was stolen. The art gallery has never been more infiltrated.

But, more strikingly, there’s also been a change in the way we see art. With a collective attention deficit thanks to our phones, demand for more immersive experiences and the strange social hangover of the pandemic, our general interaction with exhibitions has changed. Visitor experience workers get to experience this experience; looking at people who are in turn looking at art. It makes for a surreal chain of perception.

Many gallery attendants are also artists in their own right, working at exhibitions to finance their own creations in the hope that, one day, their own work will be displayed. But what is it really like staring in silence for hours on end, a sitter without a painter? We spoke to gallery attendants currently working at London’s Tate, Serpentine, Barbican and V&A to hear more about the role.

Assaf Hinden's photography, viewed throughout, is exhibited at Braverman Gallery in Tel Aviv until July 6 2024

bravermangallery.com

Gallery attendants on watching you looking at art…

Eleanor, Tate

Eleanor: I started at Tate Modern in December 2022 after studying Art History at University. At Tate, we're ‘visitor engagement assistants’, so there's a focus on creating a safe environment and talking to visitors. Having conversations with visitors who are enthusiastic about art is a genuine pleasure at work. Some of the art on display really evokes strong reactions in people, especially impressive large-scale ones like those in the Turbine Hall.

Tastes may have changed over time but big names have always attracted a lot of interest, with many visitors still asking for Picasso, Warhol, Rothko or Pollock. Social media may have had an impact on the increase in interest in immersive or interactive art exhibitions. Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms was hugely popular and Yoko Ono's new exhibition is also proving to be busy due to visitors activating the art themselves.

You can become somewhat indifferent to the works after seeing them so often. But reading the wall text for a piece of art that you have seen thousands of times and never really been interested in can sometimes end up in you finding out something that you didn’t expect to learn. 

Attention spans really vary, with some people rushing through the galleries barely stopping to look at anything and some spending hours reading every piece of text available; apparently, on average, people look at a work on display for just eight seconds.

Laura, Barbican

Laura: The gallery is a space that shows the absurdity of life in the most delightful of ways. It's not for everyone. Many people quit within a few months. You have to be comfortable with your own thoughts and endure visuals and sounds for a long period of time; one piece, from Rangar Kjartansson, featured the same song for seven hours; another, in the Carolee Schneemann exhibition, featured a mop consistently dropping onto a TV. These might interest, inspire or amuse you, but also irritate, shock or bore you.

Interacting with the visitors can be very rewarding, but people frequently don’t acknowledge an invigilator’s presence, which means you can often be a fly on the wall to some entertaining conversations and behaviour. I’ve witnessed crying, laughing, screaming and, one disturbing day, a couple being overly amorous believing they had the gallery to themselves!

Often visitors feel like they need answers from you. Some come purely to take photos, never truly taking their eyes off their screen. Lots of people use it as a space to catch up with family and friends, dipping in and out of rooms and occasionally muttering comments about the work but mainly focusing on conversations with the people they’re with.

One of my most challenging moments was when a member of the public broke a very delicate sculpture right in front of me by suddenly slapping it with their hand. After seeing my shocked expression, she said, ‘I don’t think it’s art‘, and then walked away as if nothing had happened. You learn quickly that people have a natural desire to touch or get closer to things they’re not meant to.  

Some of my best ideas have come from my role here, from fictional exhibitions I've designed to stories I've written about anthropomorphised works of art. As an artist as well as an invigilator, I fully appreciate the importance of protecting artists’ work, but sometimes a little voice inside of me thinks: ‘It’s just things, made by people, that someone decided were important.’

Hazel, Serpentine

Hazel: You truly know it’s a successful exhibition if people are engaging and asking questions, and as gallery attendants we spend a lot of time researching to help with this.

For the first couple of weeks of an exhibition, I tend to focus my mind on the artworks, trying to understand each decision and each outcome made by the artist. After a while, my mind will wander and I find myself thinking about my own art practice. It’s an obscure skill to house a studio in your mind and I’ve definitely acquired it from my time as a gallery attendant.

Staring at the same artwork for hours can really change the meaning of the work and theoretically it is a privilege, but I think there’s something poignant and ephemeral about visiting an exhibition once.

Eleanor, V&A

Eleanor: The job sits at the intersection of visitor experience and security: we have to ensure that the millions that come to the museum have an amazing experience and get the very best out of their visit, all while keeping a watchful eye over the collection so millions more may enjoy it for years to come. We inspect the condition of the collections like a gardener tending their flowerbeds – constantly aware of any little changes or warning signs. 

Over the years I have learned so much from visitors. Sometimes, being asked very specific questions that I couldn’t answer was the impetus to go home and study so that I wouldn’t be caught short again – in some cases starting new passions of my own.

One enquiry about one of the smallest, most humble pieces of pottery sparked a fascination that led me to sift through archives, import books from abroad, and eventually, develop a talk that I still give to visitors to this day. I’ve even taken pottery classes since. 

There is so much to consider when walking through a gallery. The art of the objects, of course, but the curation, too: after a while the stories and the links between pieces and displays leap out and illuminate themselves, gradually weaving together in a magnificent tapestry of art and design history. You begin to imagine all the hands that each object has passed through on their individual journeys to their modern home. It’s a magnificent illustration of the enormity of human creativity.

The act of looking, and continuing to see, requires effort. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to let the art fall away and the objects just become things you happen to be walking past. To continue to engage with them is to keep them alive – engaging with the visitors is an excellent way of doing this. Perhaps, in a glance, they see something you have never noticed in years and share it with you.

People like to make conversation too, and I have noticed recently how the chat has swung away from the objects to the big picture: what’s the point of museums? Who do they serve? Who do these objects really belong to? This type of questioning about inclusivity is really healthy. After all, it’s the same questions museums are asking themselves.

The Italian creative director of Gucci, Sabato De Sarno – who began his tenure at the house in 2023 – has so far favoured a stripped-back approach to his runway shows, a symbolic departure from the theatrical runway presentations of his forebear Alessandro Michele. His last men’s and womenswear outings in Milan were shown in the Fonderia Carlo Macchi, a concrete-walled former industrial space on the outskirts of the city, with just monolithic Gucci-branded blocks as mise-en-scène (the exact shade: Gucci ‘Ancora’ red, the designer’s signature hue).

For his first Cruise outing for the house – the globe-trotting runway shows synonymous with far-flung locations and arresting show settings – the designer has taken a different tack. Taking place in London’s Tate Modern this evening (13 May 2024), De Sarno transformed the gallery’s subterranean ‘tanks’ into a blown-up terrarium, filled with a lush jungle of around 10,000 different plants. Sabato describes it as a botanic ‘tapestry’, which after the show will be donated to community projects in London, including Life Under the Westway, an urban gardening project led by non-profit Grow to Know which will regenerate West London’s Westway-adjacent Maxilla Gardens.

First look: the Gucci Cruise 2025 show set at Tate Modern

’The Tanks’ were designed by Herzog & de Meuron and opened in 2012, seeing the Swiss studio excavate and transform three industrial cylinders which would have fuelled the turbines of the former power station which now houses the gallery. De Sarno noted a desire to bring the ’outside in’, imagining the sparse concrete space ’invaded by a poetic panorama of greenery’ in a clash of man and nature. He also noted a feeling of duality, a juxtaposition of what he sees as the two sides of London – its urban architecture versus its famous gardens and parks.

The various plants chosen were selected for their ability to grow in harsh and challenging conditions, making them easily transported to the various community growing projects after the show. These include Epimedium, Vinca, and Dryopteris, which grow well in shady city gardens, while larger shrubs and threes include Hornbeam, Parthenocissus, and Aesculus. Spring foliage, meanwhile, is selected to represent freshness and renewal.

It is also a nod, no doubt, to Gucci’s longtime links with botanicals: its most famous print, besides the house’s double-G monogram, is the ‘Flora’, which first appeared on a silk scarf in the 1960s. Comprising 43 varieties of flowers, plants and insects, the design by Italian illustrator Vittorio Accornero was created for the actress Grace Kelly and inspired by Botticelli’s ‘Allegory of Spring’. It is a motif that has long been part of the house’s heritage, inspiring the house’s 2017 fragrance Gucci Bloom. In March of this year, De Sarno revealed his own campaign for the fragrance, which saw models immersed in a pool of floating flowers.

Discover more from the Cruise 2025 runway shows here.

gucci.com

A partnership between Swatch and Tate Galleries is a natural one for the watchmaker, which has long celebrated its artistic links, working with artists including Keith Haring, Yoko Ono (whose show, ‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ is at Tate Modern until September 2024) and Annie Leibovitz over the last four decades. 

Now, the Swatch x Tate Collection pays tribute to artists JMW Turner, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, and Louise Bourgeois with a series of watches faithfully produced in the artists’ distinctive styles.

Swatch x Tate watches: a masterpiece on your wrist

 JMW Turner’s delicate brushwork becomes an abstract dial in ‘Turner’s Scarlet Sunset’, with the calendar wheel, doubling up as the sun, serving up a prism of colour over a 14-day period. In ‘Chagall’s Blue Circus’, the artist’s bold use of colour becomes a surreal circus. ‘Miro’s Women and Bird in the Moonlight’ also inhabits a magical other world, playfully intertwining Catalan references throughout a subdued dial.

In ‘Léger’s Two Women Holding Flowers’, the artist’s experiments in Cubism are translated into a clean emphasis on colour and line. Colour, too, is central to ‘Matisse’s Snail’, which sees a geometrical juxtaposition of bright forms nod to Matisse’s signature bold Fauvism style. 

Open to interpretation is the abstract design on ‘Barns-Graham’s Orange and Red on Pink’, its muted palette a romantic foil for the black indexes. In ‘Bourgeois’s Spirals’ and ‘Bourgeois’s Spirals Pay!’, the French-American artist’s joyful patterns make for a seductive watch. 

The Swatch x Tate Collection is available from £86 to £106, in Swatch stores worldwide and on swatch.com, as well as in Tate’s gallery shops and on shop.tate.org.uk 

‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ at Tate Modern is an exhibition that wants you to get involved, fittingly for an artist and activist who has long considered participation to be integral to her art. It’s the thread that runs throughout the show, her largest UK retrospective, tracing her multidisciplinary work from the 1950s to date in an immersive experience that’s faithful to the instructive core at the heart of Ono’s work.

A chronological narrative takes us from Ono’s childhood in Tokyo, Japan, to her evacuation to the countryside during the Second World War and subsequent move to New York, where she conceived her first works. The instructive elements in her art are clear early on, in pieces that encouraged viewers to light a match. The idea is explored in three parts here – in the instruction itself, the performance, and the film. 

Yoko Ono at Tate Modern

This sets the pattern for the rest of the exhibition. Through her art, Ono instructs us – play chess with all-white pieces until you can’t remember where your pieces are, remove your shoes and carry out activities inside a black bag, hammer a nail, add colour to a white boat in a reflection of displacement, write a message to your mother – and as visitors to the exhibition, we can faithfully obey.

The exhibition lingers on Ono’s five-year stay in London, from 1966, as a turning point in the radical nature of her work, tracing the connections she made with artists, writers and musicians, including husband and collaborator John Lennon. A multimedia approach invites us in, from 1969 film Bed Peace, showing the couple’s second ‘bed-in’ event, and the resulting media scourge that ensued. 

The exhibition takes its name from Ono’s concerts and events in London and Liverpool in 1966 and 1967, where ‘silent’ music reigned, present only in listeners’ minds. Here, music is everywhere, including anthems Sisters O Sisters (1972), Woman Power (1973) and Rising (1995), supporting Ono’s work for violence against women in a multisensory mash-up.

‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind’ at Tate Modern, London, 15 Feb – 1 September 2024

tate.org.uk

Frieze London 2023 – bigger, better, longer than any Frieze before – sees the world’s cultural magpies descend on the city. As Frieze marks its 20th anniversary, it’s a big moment for the world’s most famous art fair, and one it is celebrating with a packed programme of events, spanning the established – El Anatsui, Frans Hals and Ai Weiwei lead the heavyweights at Frieze Masters – to the eclectic, such as Sprüth Magers’ presentation of a Hyun-Sook Song retrospective and White Cube’s Mona Hatoum exhibition. More than 160 galleries from 46 countries will come together from 11 – 15 October. 

The action extends far beyond the perimeters of the fair’s epicentre in Regent’s Park. Saatchi Yates art cabaret with Will St John at The Box; Berlin-based and Jamaican-born multimedia artist MJ Harper’s one-off performance at London’s Koko; and Avery Singer’s show at Hauser & Wirth coinciding with Frieze’s opening are just some of our Frieze Week highlights.

Frieze London 2023: what to see in the fair

Frieze Masters presents works from the last few centuries in a generous curation. Galleria Continua will focus on the years 1983 to 1999 in a presentation of Ai Weiwei’s works including his famous Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and June, 1994. El Anatsui, whose 2023 Hyundai commission is concurrently opening at the Tate Turbine Hall, will showcase a 30-year career with a solo booth at Jack Shainman, while D’Lan Contemporary’s showing of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s paintings marks the first appearance of an Australian First Nations artist at Frieze Masters. Also not to be missed is Nigeria’s most important modernist, Ben Enwonwu, at Kó Gallery from Lagos.

Leading galleries are presenting a selection of group, solo and thematic shows. Look out for Sadie Coles HQ, which nods to the fair’s first edition in 2003 with works by artists who took part, including  John Currin and Sarah Lucas. Also feeling nostalgic is Pilar Corrias, whose solo exhibition by Margate-based artist Sophie Von Hellerman is inspired by Margate’s Dreamland. Immersive works, such as Julianknxx’s video presented by Edel Assanti, which coincides with his Barbican Curve commission, join bronze sculptures by Barbara Chase-Riboud at Hauser & Wirth. 

For Lisson Gallery, US-born artist Van Hanos is the focus, with paintings that draw from time spent in Vienna, while Pace Gallery is giving us a taster of 2024, with works by Paulina Olowska, Mao Yan, Yto Barrada, Kiki Kogelnik, and Robert Longo. At Nicola Vassell, a presentation of new paintings by Deborah Anzinger will examine the ways the artist works with ground cookshop charcoal, a fuel indigenous to her native Jamaica. In the Breguet booth, ‘Resisting Time’, curated by independent curator Somi Sim, will look at the concept of time through artists including Hanne Darboven and Julien Coignet. Marianne Boesky Gallery will showcase Danielle Mckinney’s first U.K. solo presentation, shining a light on her paintings of female figures, caught in moments of leisure.

To celebrate Frieze London’s 20 years, eight established artists have been invited to propose a solo exhibition from an emerging artist. For Tracey Emin, Margate-based Vanessa Raw’s paintings are a natural choice; for Olafur Eliasson, it is Fabian Knecht and his installation of pieces of clothing used as camouflage to protect Russian targets in Ukraine. Anthea Hamilton champions Carlos Villa’s 1980s body-print series, Wolfgang Tillmans’ new sculptures and silver gelatin prints by Mark Barker. Meanwhile, the Modern Institute is showcasing the work of artists Rachel Eulena Williams, Jim Lambie and Andrew Sim and more

Elsewhere, talks not to miss include Thomas J Price in conversation with Gus Casely-Hayford (director, V&A East), Arlene Shechet in conversation with Sheena Wagstaff, and Rachel Whiteread with art historian Briony Fer. Towards the end of the week, catch Maggi Hambling, Sarah Lucas and Louisa Buck and Mandy El Sayegh, Flavia Frigeri and Valerie Cassel Olive.

Frieze London 2023: what to see outside the fair

There’s a packed programme of shows, performances and talks taking place around London during Frieze. 

Listen: Art for Thought Coffee Cocktail evening 

Illycaffè’s collaboration with arts club The Cultivist is a fruitful one. A series of evening talks at the Michelin-starred Apricity will see experts lead the way on arts-based topics. Joey Lico, executive director of The Cultivist (and former director at the New York Foundation for the Arts and art advisor to the White House under the Obama administration) will advise ‘How to Build an Art House’ on 9 October, while curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum East, Dr Madeline Haddon, will discuss ‘Art Through the Ages’ on 23 October. Guests can relax, learn and sip on their coffee cocktails. 

Tickets available @ £40 per person from Eventbrite.co.uk

Listen: Ruinart x Talkart podcast at Serpentine Pavilion

Maison Ruinart and Serpentine have teamed up to explore the possibilities in contemporary art. This live TalkArt podcast recording, the first in a series, will see contemporary artist Eva Jospin and Talk Art Podcast hosts Russell Tovey and Robert Diament discuss Jospin’s inspirations behind Ruinart Carte Blanche Commission, Promenade(s).

Tickets available from Eventbrite.co.uk

See: Saatchi Yates

Catch Brooklyn-based artist Will St John chatting to journalist and photographer Marc C O’Flaherty on 9 October. See St John’s work while you are there, on show until 22 October.

saatchiyates.com/

Do: Minor Attractions

Don’t miss this ‘non-fair’ of performance, music and nightlife, held across two weeks at two different London sites. 

minorattractions.com/Minor-Attractions

154 Contemporary African Art Fair

Held for the 11th year at Somerset House, this year’s exhibition will host over 60 international exhibitors, making it the largest show to date. 

1-54.com/london

See Saatchi Yates and Will St. John kick off Frieze Week with an exhibition and cabaret

Saatchi Yates is marking the beginning of Frieze London 2023 with a celebration of its three year anniversary. To commemorate the the occasion, the space will host an exhibition with artist Will St. John, who created classically influenced portraits of New York’s drag queens and trans community through painting and sculpture. The gallery will be hosting a talk at 6:30 on Monday 9 th October which is open to the public and his eponymous exhibition itself will be running until 22nd October.

wallpaper.com

Don't miss: Nanomuseum, a limited-edition collaboration between French jewelry house Dauphin and Serpentine Galleries, at Dover Street Market

Charlotte Dauphin and Hans Ulrich Obrist have worked together to create a series of pieces inspired by works of art.  

london.doverstreetmarket.com

Visit: Kaws' takeover of London’s Shreeji News

Gabriel Chipperfield, who transformed the newsagent’s in 2020, creating a salon and reading room and space for events and exhibitions, as well as a wide selection of magazines, let Kaws lead the way when it came to his residency

wallpaper.com

Visit: Avant Arte at Matches

Avant Arte is taking over Matches townhouse at 5 Carlos Place, London, during Frieze, with the installation on display until 4 November. 

avantarte.com

Fall down the rabbit hole into Charlotte Colbert’s Frieze Week dreamland

‘Dreamland Sirens’, a London exhibition from Charlotte Colbert, is curated by Simon de Pury and LA-based gallery UTA Artist Space

wallpaper.com

Don't miss: MJ Harper’s performance piece at London’s Koko 

Artist MJ Harper will premiere ‘Arias for a New World’ at Koko in London this Sunday, 15 October 2023

wallpaper.com

See: Bronx-Based Artist Kenny Rivero's UK debut

The artist's first exhibition outside of the US and Mexico unites his paintings and drawings at Charles Moffett, No. 9 Cork Street, from 5 - 21 October.

https://charlesmoffett.com/artists/13-kenny-rivero/

See:  Yinka Ilori's piece created for member's club George for Frieze London

Yinka Ilori draws on his Nigerian heritage for the piece on show at George Club throughout Frieze. 

georgeclub.com

Tate Modern has announced The Infinities Commission, a new annual commission to support experimental and visionary work from rising artists worldwide. The chosen artist will have their work displayed in The Tanks, London the gallery’s exhibition space dedicated to installations, performance, and film. The exhibition will be free for the public to access each year. 

Contemporary art is the foundation of The Infinites Commission, which is intended to encourage aspiring artists to be experimental, to have no boundaries or fear when it comes to creating. By providing a platform for international contemporary artists, the commission will enable them to delve into innovative, forward-thinking projects, which in turn can contribute to a turning point in their career. 

The first commission will be unveiled in spring 2025 in The Tanks at Tate Modern, and will be selected by a highly regarded panel of experts in their fields during summer 2024. 

The inaugural selection panel includes British musician and artist Brian Eno, whose Turntable won a Wallpaper* Design Award, and who recently worked with U2 on their new Las Vegas show. Also on the panel is Senegalese and French critic and curator Oulimata Gueye; German artist Anne Imhof; Italian curator Andrea Lissoni, artistic director of Haus der Kunst in Munich; and Legacy Russell, executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen in New York.

One artist will be selected to showcase their work, with three further artists to be granted £10,000 of research and development funding to support the progression of their work. 

Catherine Wood, Tate Modern’s director of programmes, said: ‘Artists have always been innovators, taking ideas, materials and technologies in unexpected directions and pushing them to their limits. Today, such artists are working in highly inventive ways, freely crossing a variety of disciplines to create speculative, disruptive, or immersive projects that sit outside conventional artistic categories. The Infinities Commission will give that kind of innovative work a home at Tate Modern and allow a broader public to experience it.’

tate.org.uk

The Tate Modern cafe has been given a makeover courtesy of London architecture studio Holland Harvey. The much loved gallery always had a hospitality space on its ground level, yet changing needs and several years in operation, meant the popular northwest corner interior was in need of a refresh. Enter the practice led by Richard Holland and Jonathan Harvey, and now the reimagined cafe has just opened its doors looking better than ever, filled with minimalist touches and sustainable architecture elements. 

The Tate Modern cafe reimagined

Fittingly named 'Corner', the new Tate Modern cafe (commissioned by Tate Enterprises) is a bustling all day cafe and bar area, used by staff and visitors during the day, as well as special events and late-nights as part of the gallery's busy programme. As a result, this needed to be an interior with some inherent multi-tasking, able to shapeshift and transform from a day to an evening venue, catering for anything from meetings, eating, coffee, bar and bigger parties. 

The answer was in the creation of a series of bespoke elements and 'zones' or 'neighbourhoods', as Holland Harvey stripped back the space and fitted it with a variety of furniture - some loose and some built in, to ensure different needs are covered. Specially made pieces by Goldfinger meet tabletops created by Spared reusing Tate Coffee grounds, and lighting design by There’s Light. There is even a loosely circular bench area whose seats can be lifted using a mechanical system to transform it into a DJ booth. 

'Tate Eats and Holland Harvey worked closely over the past 18 months to deliver Corner. Conceived as an extension of the public realm, the design seeks to be inclusive, functional, and beautiful – welcoming and accessible to all,' says Jonathan Harvey. 

hollandharvey.com 

Ai Weiwei is not known to do things in half measures. For his installation at Documenta 12, in 2007, the artist famously brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel, Germany, for staggered week-long stays, using his blog to recruit volunteers between the ages of two and 70. Titled Fairytale, the ambitious artwork seemed to herald his homeland’s arrival on the world stage (‘To explore the world is a right that you acquire when you are born, and these travellers were exercising this right for the very first time,’ he wrote in his recent autobiography), while speaking to contemporary global issues, such as mass migration and dramatic population growth. Three years later, invited to take over the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern, Ai commissioned 1,600 ceramicists in the pottery town of Jingdezhen to handcraft 100 million sunflower seeds in porcelain, which he then poured into the cavernous exhibition space to create a seemingly infinite landscape – a simple motif elevated into a powerful statement on the rise of ‘made in China’. 

Ai Weiwei:  ‘Making Sense’ at the Design Museum

Though slightly more modest in scale, the centrepiece of Ai’s exhibition at London’s Design Museum (until 30 July 2023), similarly evokes the cumulative power of the humble object. Taking over the main gallery are five ‘fields’, each between 44 and 72 sq m and filled with readymades ranging from Neolithic stone tools to Lego bricks (see his Water Lilies #1, his largest ever work in Lego), which collectively offer a snapshot of design history across eight millennia.

Titled ‘Making Sense’, this is Ai’s first exhibition focusing on design, which seems surprising coming from a conceptual artist. But Ai has always been fascinated with material culture, an interest that he credits to his life story. The son of Ai Qing, one of modern China’s most famous poets, Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957. He grew up in the northwest province of Xinjiang as a consequence of his father’s political exile. Denied proper accommodation, the family lived in a dugout – a picture of which remains the lock screen on the artist’s iPhone today – where they slept on a platform covered with wheat stalks, had no electricity, and constantly had to fend off rats and lice. Such squalid conditions necessitated improvisation: Ai remembers assembling a simple shelf from a board, four nails and a piece of string, and building a stove to offer some respite from the bitter winters. These experiences informed his early understanding of design, not as an aesthetic pursuit but as ‘people using rudimentary, found materials to try and better their lives’, he explains on a crisp February morning, as we speak on the back porch of his home in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal. 

That notion of design as a survival tool was turned on its head when Ai moved to the US in 1981, becoming one of the first Chinese students to study in the West during an era of reform. He wound up in New York (where he briefly attended the Parsons School of Design), which gave him his first experience of ‘extreme capitalism’. But, in 1993, when Ai returned to Beijing to visit his ailing father, he found that China had become a capitalist state too, and was pursuing economic growth at all cost: ‘Even though I’d returned to my native land, I felt more foreign than ever.’

It was then that he began to frequent antique markets with his brother. ‘We spent at least four to six hours every day, going through thousands of pieces and trying to imagine the past. Because of the Cultural Revolution, we never had a history education,’ he explains. ‘And in the United States, everything was new. So these markets gave me the chance to really look into each object. I started to collect, and to understand the past through material culture. I developed an interest in human efforts [at shaping objects]: how they made sense, why they made sense, how they dealt with materials. And how styles completely changed from the Han dynasty to the Tang dynasty, or from the Tang dynasty to the Song dynasty. Then I understood that even a perfect language can completely disappear under different political circumstances. There’s nothing left. That gave me a lot of perspective on the human mind.’

As his stature and resources have grown, Ai’s collecting has become more prolific over the years. While he says that he only collects things that fascinate him, without regard to their potential usage in art installations, his collections now form the basis of the five fields at the Design Museum. Still Life comprises around 1,800 Neolithic stone tools, liberated from archaeological context. Adjacent, Spouts features over 240,000 spouts from the Song dynasty (960-1279), believed to have been cut off from teapots that didn’t meet quality standards. Nearby is Untitled (Porcelain Balls) (2022), featuring 100,000 porcelain projectiles from a similar period. ‘What fascinates me is that they’re not machine made, they’re handmade with such care, and none of them are exactly the same size, but they’re made to the greatest possible degree of perfection,’ enthuses Ai.

The final two fields are filled with contemporary materials. The blue porcelain fragments were salvaged from destroyed artworks in the artist’s Beijing studio, which was razed by Chinese authorities in 2018. (His Shanghai studio had likewise been torn down in 2011. In an act of reclamation, Ai is now rebuilding that studio on his Portuguese estate.) 

Meanwhile, Lego bricks have been a favoured material for Ai since 2014, when he created Lego portraits of activists, prisoners of conscience, and advocates of free speech from around the world for an installation at Alcatraz. For three months in the following year, the toymaker declined bulk orders from the artist, citing a policy that prevents its bricks from being used in ‘political works’. Ai responded with a crowdsourcing campaign: ‘People supported me by sending in their sons’ and daughters’ Lego bricks. It became a little social movement,’ he remembers. At the Design Museum, the bricks ‘show my understanding of how design not only comes out of our minds, but also exists as a product of human struggle’.

In his use of readymades, Ai pays homage to Marcel Duchamp, whom he calls ‘the engineer and designer of modern cultural activity’. He first encountered the French conceptualist’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when he arrived in the States. Realising that ‘art is in our minds, rather than in our vision’, Ai created Hanging Man (1986), a wire hanger bent in Duchamp’s profile. This is part of the new exhibition, along with three more recent pieces that resemble hangers, alluding to the 81 days in 2011 that Ai spent in secret police detention, for alleged ‘economic crimes’. He petitioned for a month before the police would allow him six plastic hangers, so he could dry his T-shirts. ‘At one point, I thought I would be imprisoned for 13 years,’ says the artist, who has since remade his symbol of oppression in wood, stainless steel and Venetian glass. In a similar vein, the show includes handcuffs in hardwood and in jade, a material with great historical and spiritual significance in China.

Within the same display case, visitors will encounter other everyday motifs refashioned in noble materials. A Styrofoam takeout box, remade in white marble, calls our attention to the environmental impact of disposable objects and the dark side of China’s economic development, while a construction helmet cast in glass suggests the fragility of labour protections in an economy built on the backs of migrant workers. While the material shifts prompt us to look at the objects in a new light, the choice of mundane typologies nods to another of Ai’s artistic heroes, Andy Warhol, who taught him that ‘what we do every day has profound meaning’.

The plight of the dispossessed is a recurring theme for Ai, who bemoans that, in spite of economic and technological progress, humans ‘remain a species with no compassion, selfish and short-sighted’. In 2008, he was spurred to action by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Sichuan province. It killed at least 69,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, whose schools collapsed due to shoddy construction to which corrupt government officials had turned a blind eye. Ai channelled his despair into a citizens’ investigation published on his blog, and began to use backpacks and steel rebar as motifs for his artwork. On view at the Design Museum will be two calls for remembrance – Snake Ceiling (2008), a 16m-long serpentine installation made of backpacks, and Rebar and Case (2014), which sees three pieces of mangled rebar remade in marble and entombed in wood.

A wooden cabinet, also made in 2014, was inspired by a different tragedy. In 2012, five boys were found dead in a dumpster bin in Guizhou province. They are believed to have lit a charcoal fire in the bin to keep warm and been poisoned by carbon monoxide. The piece ‘is like a Ming-style classic cabinet, made with the finest materials by the best craftspeople. There are no nails, just hidden joints.’ But by modelling its form after the dumpster bin, Ai is also making a powerful political statement about the people who are left behind while China becomes more prosperous. ‘It comes from my understanding of “it could have been my life”,’ he explains. A similar logic has inspired the more recent installations in the show, comprising life vests collected from the Greek island of Lesbos, bringing to light the global refugee crisis.

Alongside Ai’s sculptural and design output, there’s documentation of Beijing’s rapidly evolving built environment in the early 2000s, when the government eagerly knocked down older buildings and replaced them with looming towers. Four films take the viewer on a journey across the city’s main streets, while a photo series, National Stadium (2005-7), shows the construction of the Bird’s Nest stadium ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics. Ai worked with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on its design, but later dissociated himself from the project and boycotted the opening ceremony. ‘I realised that architecture is political. It doesn’t matter how good the building is, still, after we’ve designed it, it becomes an element of state propaganda,’ he says. In the 15 years since, we’ve seen more flagrant instances of sportswashing – among them last year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing and World Cup in Qatar. With this in mind, does Ai still believe that his disavowal of the stadium was worth the personal cost he has endured?

‘Very often, speaking up is not going to work, because the powers you’re against are so massive. And whether the Olympics or the World Cup, it’s really about profit. You have to remember this one line in the movie All The President’s Men: “Just follow the money”. Then you can understand most political intentions,’ Ai replies. Even so, he insists on taking a stand against misinformation and the loss of human life: ‘You always have to be prepared to speak out, no matter how big the consequences, to protect the most profound meaning of being human.’

That belief in free speech, and in standing up for one’s convictions, informs Ai’s Study of Perspective series. The innocuous title belies the images’ defiant intent: it shows the artist pointing his middle finger at sites of political and cultural power, such as Tiananmen Square and the White House. A selection of these studies will be on view at the Design Museum. 

Free speech is likewise the theme of The Animal That Looks Like a Llama But is Really an Alpaca 2023 (2023). Previewed on the limited-edition cover of Wallpaper's April 2023 issue, the colourful pattern is being made into a wallpaper that will wrap around the museum’s atrium. Among its motifs are surveillance cameras, handcuffs, chains, steel rebars, alpacas and Twitter birds. The alpacas are a reference to a Chinese meme that pokes fun at internet censorship, and a testament to humour as a tool against authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the birds reflect Ai’s unwavering faith in the power of social media. He became a household name in China thanks to his blog, which started in 2005 and had 17 million readers in its four-year lifetime, and remains an avid user of Instagram and Twitter today. Though he acknowledges social media’s deleterious effects on individual attention spans and its potential as a vehicle of misinformation, Ai points out that ‘we don’t have another choice. This is the only time in human history which equips us to be individuals. The overflow of information means we can make our own judgments and express ourselves independently.’

While drawing on specific contemporary concerns, ‘Making Sense’ speaks to universal human themes, says Justin McGuirk, the museum’s chief curator. ‘It takes a step back from the detail of design, and really looks at design as a way of being that hasn’t changed. Weiwei shows us that design is a language that communicates to us across generations, through which we can understand something about our ancestors.’

Ai is measured in his assessment of his own impact. He points out, for instance, that he’s not hopeful he will see a democratic China in his lifetime. This being said, as a believer in cumulative power, he is ultimately optimistic that things can change for the better: ‘My work may just be one drop of water in the ocean, but the ocean is made of water. So I want to remind people, whether in China or the West or elsewhere, that we have to understand one another, and treat one another with compassion. We have to see humanity as one.’  

‘Ai Weiwei: Making Sense’ is showing from 7 April – 30 July at Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High Street, London W8

designmuseum.org
aiweiwei.com

2022 was the year of Cecilia Vicuña. In April, the Chilean artist was honoured with the 59th Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and she was the subject of a major show at New York’s Guggenheim. In October, this series of triumphs culminated in Brain Forest Quipu, the Chilean artist's epic Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern. 

Brain Forest Quipu, which has just been named Best Art Installation in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023, is a majestic, two-sculpture installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall that blends fibre art and ancient South American communication systems to explore ecology, community and social justice.

In an interview last year, Vicuña explained how the ‘very visceral, fantastic response’ to her monumental installation, Quipu Womb (2017), which debuted at Documenta 14 and was recently acquired by Tate, was part of the reason she was selected for the coveted Turbine Hall commission. 

As Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern explained last year, ‘Vicuña has been an inspirational figure for half a century, championing concerns of ecology, community and social justice which grow ever more urgent today. Her radical textile sculptures combine pressing political messages with stunning visual form, creating a truly unforgettable experience for the viewer – one that resonates with and connects audiences all around the world. Recognition of Vicuña's powerful work is long overdue and I'm thrilled that she'll be bringing fibre art to the heart of Tate Modern for the first time.’

Given Vicuña's historical entanglement with London, where she lived in political exile in the 1970s, her Tate commission offers a sense of coming full circle. ‘I have a love for London, where everything was so difficult and beautiful at the same time. The Turbine Hall, in particular, feels like a park, like a public space, and people use it that way. I’m fascinated by that because that’s the origin of my art,’ she told us. ‘Whatever I do in the Turbine Hall will continue that spirit of complete fluidity of the public space. Even though it’s inside the museum, people take it differently, perhaps because it’s an industrial space, it belongs to everybody. Experiencing – not telling, but sensing, feeling – is the most powerful way of transmission.’

Cecilia Vicuña, Brain Forest Quipu, Hyundai Commission, until 16 April 2023, Tate Modern, London, tate.org.uk

The winners of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023 are revealed in the February 2023 issue, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The last of London's three main power stations, Lots Road Power Station, has launched its redesign. Welcome to Powerhouse at Chelsea Waterfront, which, together with the Tate Modern and Battersea Power Station, completes the trio of important pieces of London energy infrastructure and industrial architecture that have now entered a new phase in their life. 

Nestled by the water just off the River Thames, this historical coal and later oil-fired and gas-fired power station was originally built in 1905, but has remained disused for decades. Developer CK Asset Holdings Limited took on the site to transform it into a mixed-use scheme, which offers from private to affordable housing, commercial and retail units, and public space, while honouring the structure's industrial heritage. The sales launch of Powerhouse at Chelsea Waterfront was recently announced, bringing some 200 new homes onto the market. 

A team of architects led by Sir Terry Farrell has been working to restore the original building's historic red brick walls (it was hailed as the first steel-framed building in the British Isles). Construction is well underway, with Fiona Barratt Interiors working with the architects on the spaces inside – these include luxurious residential areas but also dramatic publically accessible atria in the old turbine hall. Old meets new everywhere in this project, and while the building's appearance and main bones were maintained, inside much is contemporary, ensuring the building can offer the best for its new, domestic function. A distinctive element that makes this power station stand out among its peers is its huge, elegant arched windows – which also mean it is particularly well suited to a residential conversion. 

Powerhouse will be serviced by amenities that form part of the Chelsea Waterfront wider scheme – including around-the-clock house management, a health and fitness centre, a spa, a fully equipped gym, a 20m swimming pool, and a club lounge for residents. 

‘Powerhouse is an iconic London landmark and a cathedral of the industrial age that has been rejuvenated by a world-class team of architects and designers. Taking on a revolutionary new form, Powerhouse will offer a 21st-century living experience like no other in one of London’s most coveted boroughs,' said Hutchison Property Group's Dr Edmond Ho. 

powerhousechelsea.com

Approached from the south, Es Devlin’s new public artwork in the Tate Modern Garden appears as an architectural homage, a monumental scale model of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, right across the Thames from Christopher Wren’s original. In Devlin’s piece – titled Come Home Again, and commissioned by Cartier, the dome has been sliced open to reveal its cross-section, brilliantly illuminated and adorned from tip to toe with cut-out sketches of moths, birds, beetles, wildflowers, fish and fungi. At its base are steps that lead up to choral risers, inviting passers-by to immerse themselves in Devlin’s pencil-drawn wildlife.

By day, Come Home Again is a place for contemplation and learning. Stepping into the dome allows the visitor to examine the drawings up close – there are 243 in total, representing the 243 priority species identified by the London Biodiversity Action Plan as declining in numbers in the capital and thus in need of conservation action. In lieu of the prayer books that one might expect in a place of worship, Devlin has placed QR codes that link to a guide to all the species. Just as important is the soundscape, created by Devlin’s habitual music collaborators Jade Pybus and Andy Theakstone, and interspersing recordings of various choirs singing the Latin names of the priority species with the animals’ actual sounds. Every few minutes, the glorious cacophony fades and Devlin’s voice emerges to introduce one of the species. She says its common and Latin names, and brings up a nugget of information that helps us remember the animal. We learn, for instance, that the swift (Apus apus) can fly the equivalent of eight trips to the moon and back in its lifetime.

‘I want to help people learn the names of these animals,’ explains Devlin as we speak in her south London studio two weeks ahead of Come Home Again’s unveiling.

‘Once you know their names, you make a place for them in your imagination – it’s like the memory palace. And you’ll always think of them differently.’

Even for an artist and designer who is used to being in the limelight (Devlin’s portfolio includes stage sets for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Kanye West and U2, as well as Olympic ceremonies in London and Rio), Come Home Again is a project of great prominence. Tate Modern is among London’s most visited attractions, and even more people pass by its riverfront each day – so the museum is very selective about what it allows to be placed in the garden. The site also has personal significance to Devlin, a native Londoner: ‘For me, Tate Modern is emblematic of a real shift in British culture: its opening coincided with a shift in our character as a country and city, with New Labour and the rise of the YBAs. Suddenly British culture was significant on the world stage, when it hadn’t been for many years.’

The view of St Paul’s from the Tate Modern Garden makes the cathedral a natural starting point for a site-specific commission, but it was a conversation a few years ago with Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival, that spurred Devlin to join the dots between the two spaces. ‘He said, “Es, you should think about the connection between St Paul’s as a seat of ancient ecclesiastical power, and the Tate as a seat of historical industrial power [the museum building was once the Bankside Power Station], and now a seat of contemporary cultural power. Consider that convergence of energies and think about what you might do”,’ Devlin recalls, as we pore over sketches and renderings of Come Home Again.

Around the same time as her conversation with Evans, Devlin was discovering books on eco-philosophy – encouraged by the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alice Rawsthorn, and facilitated by the Amazon algorithm. The latter led her to the two most important volumes influencing her worldview and practice today: David Abram’s Becoming Animal (‘he talks a lot about magic, and how we can shift our perceptions if we just interrupt our usual ways of seeing things’, she recaps.), and Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self. ‘Macy invites you to consider where your self ends, invites you to recognise that you feel selfish, you feel a sense of self-preservation,’ says Devlin. ‘But what if where you considered self to reside was more expansive than just in your own body and in your own mind?’

Much of Devlin’s recent work reflects on Abram and Macy: there’s Forest for Change, which planted 400 trees within the courtyard of London’s Somerset House to raise awareness for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and similarly Conference of the Trees, which populated the New York Times’ Climate Hub at COP26 in Glasgow with 197 trees and plants. Her widely photographed and Instagrammed mirror labyrinth, Forest of Us, likewise carries an environmental message; in her words ‘it calls people’s attention to the connection between themselves and the planet’. Come Home Again, with its evocation of animal species which Devlin calls ‘non-human Londoners’, continues in this vein. ‘Humans went through a period of separation from the biosphere in order to learn more about it, in order to specialise. But now we need to reconnect, and come home again to our mutual planet,’ says Devlin, adding that the words ‘dome’ and ‘home’ share etymological roots.

In her bid to better connect with the 243 priority species, Devlin decided to draw each of them in pencil on paper, using photographs as reference material. ‘That kind of observational drawing has not been part of my practice since I was doing my art A-level, but I wanted this sense of submitting to the observation of a life that’s not my own,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t trying to be expressive. So my drawing of the bumblebee isn’t my interpretation of the bumblebee, but an effort to learn the bumblebee’s ways.’

It was a four-month process that involved a few 18-hour days, and gave Devlin ample opportunity to listen to podcasts about London wildlife, and wildlife in general. The fruits of her labour are evident in the ease with which she can now identify each species and rattle off factoids: she points out, for instance, that the streaked bombardier beetle was thought to be extinct until 85 of them were counted in the borough of Tower Hamlets, and has since become a subject in the artwork of Sonia Boyce, who won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Biennale.

Within Come Home Again, Devlin’s 243 sketches have been enlarged, printed on a sustainably sourced birch ply, cut out, and displayed across the dome’s cross-section, with strips of LEDs stuck on the back for illumination (these will go back to inventory after the exhibition). The structure is made in recycled steel and stretched fabric, and she’s opted for an environmentally friendly matte paint finish, all to keep the installation’s carbon footprint to a minimum and thus align with its message. 

Elegant and impactful as it is in the daytime, it is at sunset that Come Home Again truly comes to life. Each evening until 1 October, a London-based choral group will come to the installation and sing their interpretation of choral evensong, which members of the public can enjoy free of charge and without prior booking. Devlin got the idea from her visit to St Paul’s, where she observed the daily ritual that marks the moment as the day turns to evening: ‘listening to evensong, I thought, where else would you get this experience? They’re going to sing whether you turn up or not, so it’s not a performance. It’s actually a call to prayer, a relic of a time of matins, nones and vespers. You feel like you’re part of an ancient mode of telling time. Whoever you are, you can walk in and be surrounded by this extraordinary body of music.’

The choral lineup is illustrious and reflective of London’s cultural makeup, ranging from the award-winning Tenebrae, to the London Bulgarian Choir and the South African Cultural Gospel Choir UK. They will be singing in English, Latin, Bulgarian and Xhosa – ‘I’m interested in the parallel concerns of diminishing biodiversity and diminishing linguistic diversity,’ Devlin says. ‘We’re homogenising, and our ethnosphere has also been impoverished in parallel to the biosphere. There’s an extraordinary document on endangered languages, and how you feel when you read it is also how you feel when you see the last polar bear on the last floating bit of ice. I wanted to make that connection too.’ 

She is particularly looking forward to the performance by The Choir with No Name, a chorus for homeless and marginalised people to experience the joy of singing together. ‘I defy anyone not to cry on that night. Because we’re talking about homes, and here we have people who don’t have homes, singing their hearts out. I think it’s going to be incredibly moving.’

Devlin likes to include a clear call-to-action with each installation. So just as Forest of Us in Miami encouraged visitors to make a donation to Instituto Terra, a non-profit organisation dedicated to recovering the Atlantic Forest, Come Home Again encourages audiences to contribute to and engage with the London Wildlife Trust, which protects, conserves and enhances the capital’s wildlife and wild spaces.

It’s a cause that equally resonates with Cartier, with whom Devlin has a longstanding relationship (She cites the 2019 exhibition ‘Trees’ at Fondation Cartier, which brought together artists, botanists and philosophers, as an inspiration for her recent practice). Says Cyrille Vigneron, CEO of Cartier, ‘with Come Home Again, Es Devlin has created a unique and thought-provoking work of art, a choral sculpture representing how inspiring, yet fragile the beauty of the world can be, calling to preserve earth’s natural biodiversity.’

Ultimately, Come Home Again offers a message of hope, suggesting that if we take swift and decisive action to remedy past wrongs, we can return to a happier state of equilibrium with the planet. As Devlin says in the installation’s soundscape, quoting Joanna Macy: ‘May we turn inwards and stumble upon our true roots in the intertwining biology of this exquisite planet. [...] Now it can dawn on us. We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness, we can come home again.’

Come Home Again, until 1 October 2022 at the Tate Modern Garden, Bankside, London SE1, esdevlin.com, cartier.com, wildlondon.org.uk

The work of the Korean-American artist Anicka Yi takes in science, microbial activity and air-carried markers of identity, amongst other things. The perfect pick, then, for Tate Modern’s first Turbine Hall commission (officially the ‘Hyundai Commission’) since Covid closed operations.

The commission is Yi’s largest and highest profile to date – and art commissions don’t come much larger and higher profile – but Tate Modern’s enforced closure at least gave her a good run at it. She’s been working on the installation for the last two years, a process she calls a ‘radical voyage with no roadmap’ and a journey she admits was as personal as creative. ‘There was so much transformation of every facet of the project, internally, externally. And it's a radically different project than the one we would have produced had we opened last January, or last October, as we were originally slated to do.’

When we talk, Yi is still at work on site. Details of the installation don’t stretch much beyond the fact that it will somehow touch on science, scent and artificial intelligence and Yi can’t get into specifics yet (since the interview was conducted, we have discovered this involves a series of levitating robots powered by helium and AI). She’s clear the commission, titled In Love With the World, has been a huge challenge, on multiple fronts.

Tate Modern is the most visited space for contemporary art in the world and previous Turbine Hall installations, from Anish Kapoor’s ten-storey trumpet through Carsten Höller’s slides, Ai Weiwei’s seeds, Olafur Eliasson’s artificial sun and Kara Walker’s giant fountain, have redefined the possibilities of popular public art. It’s a daunting legacy to deal with. There’s an inevitable pressure to create a huge, accessible spectacle and the trick for the Turbine Hall artist is arriving at something that works for that vast, awkward and ambiguous space.

For Yi, there is an extra level of pressure. This is her first public art project of any size. ‘The hardest part is really getting over your fear and anxiety about the wild unknown of the public,’ she says, only half joking. ‘In a gallery or a small museum, it’s a very controlled environment. Here it just feels so lawless, [there’s] so much mayhem and chaos. And now I’m on site, it’s no longer abstract, or on Zoom and spreadsheets and Word documents. I’m interfacing with the public and I'm thinking, “Oh my lord, they’re a living, breathing entity.”’

The timing and place of the commission have encouraged a new kind of generosity and legibility. ‘I think it's almost impossible to enter into the project without thinking about the loaded vastness of the space and what all of that entails. But luckily you have time to figure out your relationship to that. For me, it meant that I wanted to be exceedingly generous to the public in a way that I never have. I’ve had a very trepidatious, anxious relationship with the audience, but this project was almost like a gift to them. I reserve very little for myself. In past projects, it’s been more hermetic, codified but this is an unvarnished, unfettered sort of coming out.’

Now 50, Yi was born in Seoul but her family moved to Alabama when she was two. Her mother worked in biomedicine and had a passion for fragrance. Yi moved to London in the early 1990s, working as a fashion stylist and copywriter before moving to New York later in the decade and becoming friends with the fashion and art collective, the Bernadette Corporation.

Unsure of her calling, Yi tentatively committed herself to art, working with unusual materials and, picking up on her mother’s passion, set on sculpting with scent. Yi was determined on reversing the marginalisation of the olfactory senses in art and unpacking the cultural baggage of scent and the tight bundling of smell, misogyny and racism, what she calls the ‘bio-politics of the senses’.

She didn’t have her first solo show until 2011 but that year’s Convox Dialer Double Distance of a Shining Path, a pungent soup of powdered milk, antidepressants, palm tree essence, shaved sea lice, and ground Teva sandal dust, was a signal of intent. She also began collaborating with scientists and technologists (she describes her art as a kind of techno sensualism) and in 2014 – 15 was a visiting artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology.

Her creative adventures in material science have seen her work fermented kombucha into leather, create tempura flowers, and inject live snails with oxytocin. In 2015 she asked 100 female friends and colleagues for swab samples from orifices of their choice, used the samples to grow bacteria in petri dishes, and analysed the results to create a chemical fragrance, released at an exhibition called ‘You Can Call Me F’. 

She developed the idea a year later with ‘Life is Cheap’, collecting swabs exclusively from Asian-American women to grow bacteria on Plexiglas tiles, showing them alongside thousands of carpenter ants, a complex commentary on female labour and networks again set within a scent-scape of her own creation.

In 2019 she created two pieces for the Venice Biennale. Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble) featured animatronic moths flying inside giant lanterns made from kelp. For Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita), meanwhile, she developed a light-based language from bacteria.

Yi’s art, then, is smart, complex and heavy on the concept. Yi says there will be smell and there will be ‘entities’ at the Turbine Hall and all the conceptual density you would expect of her work. ‘It's been driven by the philosophical and theoretical, objectives, questions and interrogations.’ But she insists the installation will also provide an instant experiential hit. ‘This is so experientially driven, you don't need all of this sort of backstory.’

The show includes ‘advanced algorithmic machines’, she promises, technology far more ambitious than the animatronic moths that fluttered to life in Venice. And there is nothing fictive or sleight of hand about it. ‘There’s no screen door that you can use to pretend you did this while you were actually doing something else. It’s actually doing what we say it is doing and I’m really proud about that.’

Yi and the Tate team have been testing out elements of the work with the public and Yi has been surprised and somewhat de-centred by the strength of reaction. ‘There is a tremendous amount of feeling and it's very destabilising for me. I thought, “Oh my god, how do rock stars absorb all of that energy and emotion?” I'm by no means up there, but I've never experienced anything like this before and I don't know how you prepare for it.’

Ultimately, she hopes she has created a new kind of public experience. ‘I really hope it foregrounds how porous we all are and that what you experience is not as a monolithic public but a microcosmic, granular experience that is very overpowering.’ 

Yi’s larger goal has always been to unroot and relocate us within nature, to sensitise us to different kinds of connections. ‘We think that we have vanquished nature, that we are separate from it and let all other lowly beings, animals, plants and microbes, deal with scent. That’s why scent really, really bothers human beings, because it ties us to the natural world.’

Fittingly, for a high-concept, big-impact post-Covid exhibition, Yi’s key material in the Turbine Hall is the air we breathe. ‘We're all immersed in it, we have to share it. It reminds us that we're all genetically linked, that we are all interdependent and that there is no real beginning, middle, or end. The air we are breathing now still contains atomic nuclei from the fires that burned Joan of Arc.’

Ultimately, she is asking us to breathe in and think again. Think hard. ‘All of these scientific and philosophical certainties are starting to crumble. We need to actually come up with new ideas and update every facet of human engagement, culture, philosophy, technology, all of it.

INFORMATION

’Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi’, 12 October 2021 – 16 January 2022, Tate Modern, tate.org.uk

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) never had an exclusive relationship with one discipline. A painter, architect, teacher, magazine editor, textile designer, puppeteer, dancer and creator of absurd Dada objects, the Swiss artist’s legacy lies in her versatility, innovation and fearless experimentation. 

A pioneer of the French avant-garde, she probed the intersections of abstract art, craft and design, and proved that, in practice, such distinctions need not exist. 

A major retrospective at Tate Modern – the first of her work ever held in the UK – is dedicated to the life and work of this trailblazer, and it’s been a long time coming. Through 200 key works and objects from collections across Europe and America, the show captures how an artist, once overlooked and in the shadow of her husband – the German-French sculptor and Dada doyen Hans Arp – quite literally gave geometric abstraction a new vocabulary. 

Taeuber-Arp was heavily involved in Zurich Dada, a short-lived, but potent movement which sought to seamlessly fuse art and life. During this time, she created some of her most defining works: a set of abstract ‘Dada Heads’ made in turned polychromed wood. Primary colour-drenched wall pieces – wool on canvas, oil on canvas, oil on wood – capture Taeuber-Arp’s taste for the relentless pushing of material potential. 

Haegue Yang on the lasting influence of Sophie Taeuber-Arp

What is most striking about Taeuber-Arp’s work is its longevity of relevance and enduring influence with contemporary artists across the creative landscape. One such artist is Haegue Yang, whose current solo show ‘Strange Attractors’, at Tate St Ives runs until 26 September.

In her own words, the Korean artist offers insight into Taeuber-Arp’s enduring impact on her work and outlook:

‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a dancer, painter, sculptor as well as weaver, architect, and educator, is a figure of complexity. Both spiritualist and modernist, her double soul is evident in her affiliation with an international style and vernacular treatment of material,’ says Yang.

‘Her capacity to encompass these movements and the zeitgeist of her time and beyond fascinates me. For example, her sculpture Coupe Dada (1916/18) seems to be an enclosed container, a mysterious and vibrant melting pot fusing extraordinarily diverse practices. 

‘Her accommodating force of hybridity empowers even non-European artists like me to access the Western avant-garde as atonality with ruptures.’

INFORMATION

‘Sophie Taeuber-Arp’ at Tate Modern runs until 17 October 2021, tate.org.uk

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To coincide with the recent opening of its Yayoi Kusama exhibition, Tate Modern is serving up a new menu at its Level 6 restaurant inspired by the artist.

While no polka-dot pumpkins will be on offer here, the new menu will include Japanese lunch options and weekend Afternoon Tea with colourful, bite-size desserts and finger sandwiches with an umami twist. 

We recommend booking your spot at the roof-top restaurant and indulging in a starter of Okonomiyaki made with jersey royal potatoes and ginger coriander pesto or bitting into some saucy Fried Cornish red chicken wings sprinkled with dashi salt.

Next, move on to flavour-packed delicacies like, Yakitori venison with burnt spring onions, ponzu and cucumber; or try the Teriyaki roasted aubergine with shimeji mushrooms and oshitashi, a dish so impressively plated it almost seems a shame to eat it.

Here at Wallpaper* we're big fans of miso-inspired desserts, so we recommend finishing off the meal with the rich Miso chocolate mousse. That said, the Rhubarb sundae with kokuto caramel sauce is an especially delightful indulgence, featuring hot pink sauce and a cloud-like texture that's bound to spring a smile.

For something lighter, experience Afternoon tea as you've never had it before. Munch on sweet treats like Matcha tea scones with clotted cream and cherry and sakura compote; or savoury sandwiches like Miso roasted beef with pickled mouli, wasabi, and watercress. Wash it all down with some 'shimmer' tea, a pinky red brew that smells and tastes like cherry pie and is bursting with sparkling, edible glitter. 

Whatever you decide to go for, these knockout dishes are so good they'll have you seeing stars before you even step into Kusama's Infinity Mirror. An ideal way to celebrate a day back in the galleries for the first time in a long time.

INFORMATION

tate.org.uk

‘Pâté for the Cat’. ‘Caviar with the Shar'. ‘Tuna Fish Disaster’. Just some of the intriguingly (if not invitingly) titled dishes gracing Tate Modern's menu from March 2020. Created by head chef of Level 9 restaurant Jon Atashroo, ‘Flavours from "The Factory"' is inspired by American artist Andy Warhol, whose life and work is the focus of this year's blockbuster Tate Modern exhibition. It's the first time the institution has exhibited Warhol in depth in two decades.

The artist had a curious relationship with food. ‘I was particularly interested in the social pressures Warhol felt when eating out, along with food as a recurring motif in his work and life,' Atashroo explains. ‘My menu is based around this whilst incorporating a number of culinary anecdotes I uncovered during my research.'

It's widely known, for example, that Warhol had an insatiable sweet tooth. He was a fan of fruit (he particularly cherished cherries), opulent desserts, and little else. Atashroo's menu features four sweets, designed for sharing, including the artist's favoured breakfast Kellogg's Corn Flakes (which he is known to have eaten when he woke up in the early afternoon, and immortalised in his 1964 installation piece of the same name). In his signature style – pairing delicious ingredients with unconventional techniques – Atashroo has infused the milky cereal into a light pana cotta.

The chef keeps things light with a witty savoury menu that captures Warhol's indifference to conventional eating. ‘Tuna Fish Disaster' – inspired by the artist's 1963 silkscreen print depicting the story of two ladies who died from a tainted can of tuna; while the Edie Beale-esque ‘Pâté for the Cat’ – a reference to a quote stating that Warhol's ‘hairdresser's cat ate his leftover pâté at least twice per week.'

You can dine like Warhol (and his hairdresser's cat) during the exhibition's season-long run in the museum's Level 9 restaurant. But if ‘Tuna Fish Disaster' doesn't take your fancy, perhaps Warhol's Favourite Frozen Hot Chocolate will, also available throughout Tate Modern's cafés.

INFORMATION

tate.org.uk

In September 1986, El Anatsui walked into his freshman design class, asked his students to draw egusi soup, then walked out. He left no further instruction. The students, in their first semester at University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN), debated for hours what exactly their lecturer wanted. How do you paint egusi, recreate its yellow paste of crushed melon seeds on canvas? Do you include hints of cow tripe that go into it? Some Nigerians prefer theirs with crayfish. How do you account for that? Some students decided Anatsui was looking for an idea or concept. Others gravitated towards form and saw it as a test by the artist of who could draw the best. Anatsui’s intentions were less complicated and echo his own artistic philosophy. He wanted his students to reflect on an ‘object’ that was a part of their immediate environment as an entry point to solving an art problem. After all, egusi soup is one of the most popular dishes in Nigeria, eaten with different local variations across the country.

‘This was the first signal that he thought things out differently,’ says Chika Okeke-Agulu, a member of that class. He is now an art historian and co-curator of Anatsui’s travelling exhibition, ‘Triumphant Scale’, which opens in October at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. It’s this ability to ‘think things through differently’ that helped Anatsui become one of the most accomplished contemporary artists of his generation. This year he is also showing for the third time at the Venice Biennale, as part of Ghana’s inaugural pavilion (he won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement back in 2015).

Anatsui was born in Ghana in 1944, the youngest of his father’s 32 children, but has lived in Nsukka for the last 45 years. His mother died when he was a baby and Anatsui was raised by his uncle, a Presbyterian minister, who ‘sheltered’ him from local cultural practices, convinced by conventional Christian wisdom that they were heretic. Despite his uncle’s intentions, Anatsui would embrace and then advance the artistic traditions of his ancestors.

He developed his artistic philosophy – of using what the environment throws up as medium – after graduating from Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology (KNUST). His first medium was the wooden trays used to carry goods in Ghanaian markets. ‘You should look for things around you,’ he says, ‘and not look for anything else, because if you find materials from around you, you will do work that relates to your location and circumstances.’

He has held on to these foundational principles and experimented with wooden mortars, broken ceramics, cassava graters, printing plates and milk tins; creating work with fluid forms, reminiscent of textiles, upsetting categories of sculpture, exploring the reuse and transformation of materials, proving how these materials are at once local and specific and yet transcend place. ‘My work has freedom as its watchword, the idea of freedom being able to shape itself or get shaped in different ways. Each time it is an opportunity to do something new. This has been my principle leading up to the bottle cap series.’

Of all his mediums, it’s the use of liquor bottle caps (a reminder that alcohol was an item of barter in colonial trade across Africa) that made him a global art star. Anatsui had been exhibiting consistently since 1969 and in Europe and the States since the mid-1990s. But he became an ‘overnight success’ at the 2007 Venice Biennale, where he draped Fresh and Fading Memories, a monumental tapestry made of liquor bottle caps and copper wire, over the 15th century Gothic façade of the Palazzo Fortuny. ‘It was a bit of surprise. I went from struggling and trying to get things to move and then, all of a sudden, they just pick up and you’re like, what is happening?’


His Doha exhibition surveys his five-decade career, including the bottle top sculptures, ceramic sculptures from the 1970s, wood sculptures and wall reliefs from the 1980s and 1990s; and lesser known drawings, prints and sketchbooks. ‘The term “Triumphant Scale” encompasses not only materiality, but also the journey, and the journey of artists like him from what used to be called the margins to what is now the mainstream,’ Okeke-Agulu explains. ‘Anatsui is an artist working in a place called Nsukka that very few people can identify on a map, and whose work has inevitably compelled art world types to know where Nsukka is.’


Anatsui arrived in Nsukka in the mid-1970s to teach at the Fine and Applied Arts department of UNN (he remained there until 2011). He often went to surrounding villages around Nsukka to be inspired by the sculptural expressions of its people. It was in one of these mountainside villages, in 1998, that he discovered liquor bottle caps by accident – in a trash heap. He took them to his studio. Eight months later, it occurred to him to explore them as a medium. ‘People are constantly shaping things, arranging things and installing things without calling them art. But with one’s experience, one knows it’s an idea that can be developed into art,’ says Anatsui.


Nsukka has been the well spring of Anatsui’s productivity in other ways and the foundation of his artistic legacy. In 2001, he gathered a number of artists, his former students – also working in unlikely mediums – and curated an exhibition of their works, titled ‘New Energies’. The unconventional show, which took place at the Nimbus and Mydrim galleries in Lagos, caused a scandal but helped launch careers. Some of Anatsui’s acolytes – Nnenna Okore, Gerald Chukwuma, Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Ndidi Dike, Eva Obodo – might be familiar and if you don’t know them, you should. Anatsui also sponsors an annual exhibition and competition, titled ‘Life In My City’, with six finalists visiting the Dakar Biennale.

In Anatsui’s Nsukka studio are several ceiling-high pyramids of crates, in which his works are encased, most bound for faraway destinations, a few returning from abroad. Scattered around them are woven plastic sacks of bottle caps, copper wires, pliers, shears, chainsaws, cut strips of aluminium foil and the quiet enthusiasm of Anatsui’s studio assistants. There are about ten of them present (sometimes there are up to 40) working in groups of twos and threes, binding the bottle caps with copper wire: which eventually become tapestries that Anatsui has conceptualised. Given his style of small forms becoming a monumental mass, it is unclear how many works are being created. The volume of the work in front of the assistants gives nothing away. Nor does Anatsui.

To the left of the studio, there are crates to be despatched to Marrakech, São Paulo and Ontario. In another corner, work destined for Paris, Frankfurt, London. To reach any of these destinations, movers have to journey nine hours by road from Lagos to Enugu, the nearest city to Nsukka, and then drive back to the port city. These long, important journeys were highlighted by the influential Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of Haus der Kunst in Munich, who organised the first showing of ‘Triumphant Scale’ from his hospital bed (Enwezor had cancer and died earlier this year). By his design, the first set of work seen by visitors to Haus der Kunst had been shown in three iconic museums on both sides of the Atlantic: the British Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The American author Toni Morrison once said, ‘I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.’ It could describe Anatsui’s career too. And the rest of the world is now knocking at Anatsui’s door. Does this create some kind of creative pressure to please, to satisfy this demand?

‘I don’t feel any pressure because you know that you are reaching people. If you weren’t reaching them, they wouldn’t be demanding. It stimulates you to work hard. I don’t bother to ask how the work reaches them,’ says Anatsui. ‘As an artist, you have a leadership role – you lead and see whether they will follow.’

As originally featured in the October 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*247)

INFORMATION

‘Triumphant Scale’, 1 October – 31 January 2020, Mathaf. mathaf.org.qa; el-anatsui.com

ADDRESS

Mathaf
Education City Student Center
Doha

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Bowlfuls of carbon-conscious, seasonal, and vegetarian fayre greet guests gathered for ‘Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life’ at Tate Modern’s Terrace Bar. If you’ve come to get closer to the globally recognised star-artist, to understand him ‘IRL', breaking bread is the place to start.

These bowls go deep. They represent Studio Olafur Eliasson’s message – of sustainability, community and experimentation – in its most elemental form. The Berlin studio (which comprises craftsmen, architects, archivists, filmmakers, administrators, cooks), is famed for its communal approach, typified by the daily lunches, cooked and eaten family-style on long benches. Think wholemeal sourdough and beet soup for the soul.

The exhibition packs bellyfuls in. A 39m corridor of dense fog; 450 models, prototypes, and geometrical studies from the artist’s studio; a huge wall of reindeer moss from Finland – it’s an ambitious mesh of Eliasson’s three-decade long exploration of (among other things) climate change.

Outside, a dramatic Waterfall (2019) installation measures over 11m in height, with its exoskeleton of pumps and pipes on display. It’s positioned not far from where Ice Watch (an installation of glacial ice from Greenland) stood in December 2018, in a poignant curatorial decision that reflects the fragility of melting ice caps. Inside, the theme ruminates. One of the quieter exhibits, a series of photographs of Iceland’s glaciers taken by the artist in 1999, will be replaced in the autumn by a new artwork that incorporates the old series alongside photos taken 20 years on, illustrating the changes in this landscape that are happening now.

In a continuation of his Tate takeover – which, for the institution, no doubt presents exciting opportunities to replicate the blinding success of Eliasson's glowing sun, that attracted more than two million people in 2003 – a city of white Lego will be dropped into the Turbine Hall later this month, upon which visitors can unleash their inner architect.

INFORMATION

‘Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life’, until 5 January 2020, Tate Modern. tate.org.uk

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

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The first posthumous UK retrospective of Austrian artist Franz West has surfaced at London’s Tate Modern following a run at the Centre Pompidou. A chronological compendium of work spans the artist’s anarchic career, curated by Mark Godfrey and Christine Macel with scenography by British artist Sarah Lucas.

This month, West is infecting London at a viral pace with David Zwirner gallery simultaneously offering sculptures and works on paper. West formed Zwirner’s inaugural show in the 1990s: ‘It was completely unsuccessful. We sold nothing,’ recalls Zwirner. A few years and art sales later, West decided to move his work al fresco, much to the gallerist’s surprise. ‘“Franz, with all due respect, since when are you interested in the great outdoors?’” he asked. ‘Franz rolled his eyes, reached his finger into his nose, pulled out a sizeable booger, and in a nonchalant gesture flicked it onto the floor to clarify the creative process behind this new body of work.’

Back at the Tate Modern, West’s immense outdoor sculptures inflict a visual onslaught before we’ve even reached the Blavatnik Building doors. These pneumatic lumps, gobstoppers and twisted tumorous tubes are phallic, fecal, intestinal or testicular depending on your angle or mood. The only reason they’re not utterly repugnant is down to their candy-coloured resin lacquer. Rrose Drama (2001), Kugel (2006) and Omega (2008), bolstered in aluminium, resist the elements but not it seems, an inevitable plague of selfies.

West took a while to emerge. A combination of singular vision, feisty temperament and weakness for alcohol left him largely unacknowledged on Vienna’s oversaturated 1970s art scene. Tate walks us through early maquettes collages and illustrations covering seedy sexual encounters, isolated figures and urination. Here, West is honing that sharp, satirical wit, through self-parody and the slating of his elders in the Viennese Actionist movement. ‘In early years he wasn’t given the opportunities,’ says Godfrey, ‘but by the mid-1980s he was adamant to be taken seriously.’

It’s difficult to follow the artist’s train of thought. It’s even harder to distinguish the humour from sincerity. One thing West was serious about was flouting the sour-faced institutional doctrine: ‘Please don’t touch the artworks’. For him, audience input was non-negotiable. Tate obliges, providing four sculptures (replicas) for visitors to swing, poke and fondle at leisure without being escorted off the premises. Feeling self-conscious? Fear not, two curtained cubicles ensure that whatever happens between you and West’s Passstücke sculptures is entirely your own business.

In the 1980s, the artist took viewer involvement to new heights. The results were furniture works where ‘form follows function’ becomes reversible, interchangeable and downright confused. Eo Ipso (1987), a sea-foam green chair construction resembles a child’s slide and looks like it could have been fashioned by one, and Untitled (Sitz, [1988-9]) has an impracticality that verges on torturous. West’s furniture is as batty as his art and twice as uncomfortable.

His friend, collaborator and YBA icon Sarah Lucas intervenes with plinths, pedestals and walls splattered with paint-filled eggs, a classic Lucas touch West would have undoubtedly admired – an egg in the face for institutional pomp. In the early 2000s, when West first invited Lucas to take part in a show, she admitted she had ‘mixed feelings’. ‘I was suspicious – in that young, pompous artist sort of way – thinking he must be after ideas!’ she says, later realising his intentions lay in legitimate collaboration.

Precariously posed on Lucas’ plinths are sculptures made in lo-fi, low-cost materials like iron and wood caked in liberal, unruly layers of plaster. Some involve West’s interpretation of the ready-made: radios, brooms and even whisky bottles – ‘Their form reminded me of their contents. I had poured it into myself and it was now my own,’ he once explained. With Duchamp in mind, West also said, ‘If I wanted to make a readymade today, I would make a pissoir, but one you could really piss into, in a museum.’ Thankfully, his fully functional pissoir (Étude de couleur, 1991) did come to be, though not installed on Tate Modern’s roof as he’d once hoped.

West’s penchant for piss persists in a film exploring the history of toilet and urinal design shown in Auditorium (1992), a cinema-like installation with rows of sofas draped in rancid old carpets. Back on the sculpture trail, objects sprout wayward prosthetic limbs, resemble non-ergonomic sex toys or look dental (incidentally his mother’s profession) with a random assortment of teeth that all appear to be making a dash for the exit. Further in, the supersize Epiphanie an Stühlen (2011) looms overhead, like a polystyrene virus or hot-pink Sputnik inducing terror, a chuckle or a little bit of both.

Seduced by naivety, naughtiness and piss taking in every sense of the idiom, we’re lured into West’s comedy sketch, but it’s all a hoax. Beneath the layers of plaster and ‘one-drink-too-many’ chaos lurks a meticulously well-read artist with an acute understanding of psychology and relational aesthetics. He borrowed yet maintained originality; he repulsed and intrigued simultaneously. West knew, and still seems to know exactly what he’s doing.

INFORMATION

‘Franz West’, until 2 June, Tate Modern. tate.org.uk

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

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‘Anni Albers avoided defining herself in narrow terms and was constantly innovating and exploring new avenues for creating art,’ says Lucy Weber, director of Albers by Design at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. The extensive and experimental output of the Bauhaus pioneer is currently on display at the Tate Modern, as part of a seminal retrospective, spanning everything from the creative studies in colour and pattern she produced while studying at the German school, her commercial and function-led creations and her art-focused small-scale ‘pictorial weavings'.

Annie Fleischmann joined the Bauhaus school in 1922, and went on to marry her teacher Josef Albers in 1925, shortly after her arrival in Weimar. Both went on to become leading pioneers in 20th-century modernism, and the duo are renowned for their output in painting, colour theory, textile design and weaving. Josef published his artist’s handbook Interaction of Color in 1963, and Anni released her seminal text On Weaving in 1965. 

A collaborative spirit was at the centre of the Bauhaus philosophy, and it’s particularly pertinent that this spirit of partnership has continued after the Albers’ death, in the form of capsule collections between fashion designers and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

‘In many instances, Anni has left us a perfect road map for creating new objects, from rugs, to blankets, to wallpaper and upholstery materials,' Weber says. ‘I have also noticed that designers are drawn to the order and precision of Josef’s work, as well as to his use of colour.’

Here, we discover what draws Hermès, Paul Smith and Roksanda to the work of the two modernist masters…

Hermès

‘Albers’ principle was a simple one: to create a series of infinite chromatic variations within an unchanging form: the square, composed in a certain way,’ says Hermès’ artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas. In the Parisian maison’s 2008 collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Dumas and women’s universe creative director Bali Barret, travelled to its home in Bethany, Connecticut, to view pieces in Josef’s ‘Homage to the Square’ series.

What resulted was a series of tonal silk scarves – the first in Hermès’ ‘Editeur’ series, which has also seen collaborations with Daniel Buren, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Julio Le Parc – evoking the square variations of colour in Albers’ artworks. ‘They took us to the limits of our savoir-faire,’ Dumas adds. ‘The technique is “frame” printing, but at its most challenging, involving the feat known as “edge to edge,” in which large swathes of colour have to be printed on the silks, so that they touch each other but do not overlap.’

Paul Smith

‘Following a bad cycling accident, I started hanging out in a local pub, in Nottingham, meeting up with students from the local art college when I was there. They told me about this thing called “Bauhaus” and at first I thought it was a council estate but I soon learnt otherwise!’ laughs Paul Smith. ‘It was during one of those conversations that I first heard mention of Anni and became aware of her work.’

In celebration of the Tate Modern’s recently opened Albers retrospective, Smith has designed a men’s and women’s Scottish cashmere jumper, scarf and blanket inspired by a colourful and graphic and untitled wallhanging from 1925. Smith’s A/W 2015 collection – which featured garments panelled in graphic squares of colour, also nods to the tonal gradation in Josef and Anni Albers’ work – took its cues from the couple's research trips to Mexico.

‘I’m most inspired by Anni’s very experimental and pioneering approach to using unexpected materials and fibres,' Smith says. ‘She’d weave a piece of plastic or rayon in the most unlikely of places. She was a true visionary.'

Roksanda

‘Josef Albers really showed how different colours can look completely different in various combinations,’ says Roksanda Ilinčić, who collaborated with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in 2013, on an eight-piece capsule collection, which also celebrated the opening of her Mount Street boutique in London. The designer is renowned for her prowess and agility with colour, and this offering of dresses and separates, was colour-blocked into distinct panels. The pieces looked to the colour theory of Josef Albers’ ‘Homage to the Square’ series, and nodded to particular works like the Homage to the Square (La Tehuana) (1951) and Homage to the Square (1965).

Anni Albers’ work permeates her aesthetic. ‘I’ve also always been drawn to her status as a woman within Bauhaus. Women were expected to work on weaving and tapestry, but she tore up the perception that applied arts categories can’t be worthy of our admiration or high status. Josef and Anni are people that I come back to again and again.’

INFORMATION

‘Anni Albers’ is on view until 27 January 2019. For more information visit the Tate Modern website; Albers Foundation website, Hermès website, Paul Smith website, Roksanda website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London
SE1 9TG

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‘Where do the creative spheres of the technician and the artist meet?’ asked Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in 1926. For artist, teacher and textile pioneer Anni Albers, the meeting point was a weaving loom – a humble tool that she would transform into a vehicle of innovation.

Anticipating 100 years since the founding of the Bauhaus, Tate Modern is hosting Albers’ first major UK retrospective, following an extensive exhibition at the K20 museum in Düsseldorf. Tracing a production line of 350 studies, wall hangings, jewellery and prints, and reinforced by Albers’ seminal books, On Designing and On Weaving, the exhibition provides a rounded chronology of the methodology and research of perhaps the most influential textile designer of the 20th century.

The Bauhaus was a manifesto made flesh, a creative powerhouse disbanded by Nazis before it could reach full force. For Hitler, it was the Jewish threat incarnate; for those who attended, it promised a new, liberal mode of education. Having joined in 1922, Albers soon became intrinsic to the rationalist, functionalist Bauhaus, and the Bauhaus in turn became a work of living art.

Shortly after arriving as a student on the Weimar campus, Anni Fleischmann (as she was then known), married her teacher, Josef Albers, drawn by their mutual devotion to abstraction. The young couple relocated to the Dessau campus in 1926; Josef began his post as junior master and Anni began giving warmth to the often sterile architecture of modernism.

Anni Albers in her weaving studio at Black Mountain College, 1937

Although gender policy at the Bauhaus was supposedly egalitarian, women were still spurned from certain disciplines; Albers sacrificed painting (her first love) and fell into weaving by default. ‘The rule was, women were weavers,’ explains Torsten Blume, research associate at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. ‘Women were seen as soft and too weak for serious thinking. The strange thing is, weaving was the most intellectually challenging workshop at the Bauhaus.’

Albers reveled in the flexibility, complexity and unforgiving rigidity of the loom, refining her distinctive ‘pictorial weaves’ in the workshop she first described as ‘rather sissy’ but would come to lead. ‘Circumstances held me to threads and they won me over,’ she wrote, decades later.

In 1933, the Albers fled Germany to America, travelling to Mexico, Cuba, Chile and Peru. Anni became enthralled with ancient South American weaving techniques, tying historical ‘craft’ weaving with the vocabulary of modern art, then spinning both into architecture.

In her own words, Albers’ textiles ‘find a form for themselves... not to be walked on, only to be looked at.’ But her work did find function, as free-hanging room dividers and acoustic implements. Six Prayers, a meditative six-panel Holocaust memorial woven in cotton linen, raffia and stiff metal yarn, was an especially powerful example of an art form she revolutionised.

With Verticals, 1946, by Anni Albers, red cotton and linen. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany CT. © 2018 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London. Photography: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art

Albers relentlessly toyed with materials including horsehair, silk, chenille, cotton, jute and even cellophane, which lent iridescence to her work. ‘She articulates the way handweaving can become a laboratory,’ says art historian Briony Fer, who curated the exhibition at Tate.

The artist’s looms are presented here as an extension of her body and weaving as a discipline demanding rhythm, foresight and sensitivity to material. ‘Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that, which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials,’ Albers said.

Albers continues to influence a thread of contemporary creatives including fibre artist, Sheila Hicks – who studied under both Anni and Josef – and fashion designer Paul Smith, who is currently crafting a limited-edition line of Albers-infused knitwear.

The exhibition is not only a merited celebration of the artist’s work, but also an argument against the spurious division between art and craft. ‘Galleries and museums didn’t show textiles, that was always considered craft and not art. When it’s on paper it’s art,’ Albers remarked in 1984. Fatefully, it was only thanks to prints produced in her latter years that the artist ultimately gained the recognition her weaves were so long denied.

INFORMATION

‘Anni Albers’ is on view at Tate Modern from 11 October 2018 – 27 January 2019. Organised by Tate Modern and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. For more information, visit the Tate website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

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The British designer Margaret Howell is the maker of beautiful but discreet clothes, with a strong sense of purpose and sensible proportions. This April, Howell will bring that understated aesthetic to London’s Tate Modern, as she becomes the latest guest curator of the Tate Edit shop, a bright and tidy retail space tucked to the right of the museum’s riverside entrance, and designed by Jasper Morrison in collaboration with architects Herzog & de Meuron.

The store, which opened in November 2016, is stocked with limited editions, objects for the home, and artists’ products, as selected by an in-house team and temporary editors, including Morrison and, most recently, Momoko Mizutani, of Dalston homewares boutique Momosan. It is a merchandising dream, offering picture-perfect retailing with a view of the Thames, and soon a showcase of Howell’s favourite things, from an Irish linen tea towel and a simple wire tea strainer, to an Anglepoise desk lamp and Robert Welch serving spoons.

‘I was asked, quite simply, to choose pieces I loved,’ says Howell of the brief, ‘and the selection ended up being a lot of what I sell in my own shops, not out of principle, but because those are quite personal items that I have a strong relationship with.’

At Howell’s spacious Wigmore Street store in London’s Marylebone, the clothing and accessories for which she is best known are sold alongside a revolving selection of vintage stoneware and expertly restored Ercol furniture, iterations of which Howell grew up with. Other domestic titbits – many of them brought over from Japan, where Howell, now 71, has a significant cult following and more than 100 retail outposts – further underscore her affection for fine materials and impeccable craftsmanship.

‘We like well-designed and good-quality things, but they’ve got to be useful, and they have to work. It’s like the clothes, really: I design clothes to wear for a purpose, rather than an outfit to be seen in just one evening. My clothes are meant to last. And all that applies to objects, too,’ says Howell.

Across categories and price-points, Howell’s Tate Edit – which also includes a few of her own designs (sunglasses, an apron, and silk scarves among them) – presents a snapshot of the appealing pragmatism that, alongside rigorous quality control, have come to define her eponymous lifestyle brand. In a noisy retail landscape, Howell’s edit trains our attention on the appeal of quiet, tactile objects, and the simple pleasures that can be found in taking a moment to examine, appreciate, and maybe even covet them.

‘I just don’t know how people can buy without seeing something. To make a purchase, whether it’s furniture or clothing or a teacup, I have to see it and feel it,’ says Howell. ‘It must be inherent to the time I was brought up in: one had to be quite careful, and look after things, mend them, and make them last. The few things I do choose to buy, I want to be able to keep them for a very long time.’

As originally featured in the April 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*229)

Items from Howell’s Tate Edit collection, photographed in her London Wigmore Street store. From left, sunglasses, £195 each, by Margaret Howell. Half zip wallet, £125; hinged coin wallet, £65, both by Margaret Howell. ‘Concentric’ chopping boards, from £35 each, by Asaf Tolkovsky. Stackable glasses, £24 for four, by Toyo-Sasaki Glass. ‘Concentric’ trays, from £20 each, or £130 for five, by Asaf Tolkovsky. Tea strainer, £45, by Kanaami-Tsuji. Butter dish, £65, by Noda Horo. Salad servers, £40, by Robert Welch. Tea towel in Irish linen, £12. Glass bowls, small, £42 each; large, £80, all by Fresco. Tablemat, £22, by Mourne Textiles. Stoneware beakers, from £44 each, by Keiko Hasegawa. Glass vases, £120 each, by Fresco. Table brush, £35; keyboard brushes, £20 each, all by Geoffrey Fisher

INFORMATION
Margaret Howell’s Tate Edit collection will be available in store and online from 27 April to September 2018. For more information, visit the Tate website and Margaret Howell’s website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London
SE1 9TG 

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As art editor of The Sunday Times Magazine between 1965 and 1975, David King helped revolutionise magazine design in the UK and beyond. Working with art director Michael Rand, King brought a new visual punch to the country’s first Sunday supplement, just three years old when he arrived, using bold sans serif type and tightly cropped photography, and putting together photo stories with cinematic sweep.

On the side, King also designed the covers for The Who Sell Out and Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland and photographed Muhammad Ali training for the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ bout with George Foreman (King took up editorial photography, using a Nikon F2, after four hours of instruction from Don McCullin). He also came up with a logo for the Anti-Nazi League, designed the covers for City Limits, a leftist rival to London’s Time Out guide, long departed, and later worked with Bruce Chatwin on Photographs and Notebooks.

King was also a historian and a serious Russophile, putting together one of the largest collections of Soviet posters, flyers, magazines and photography anywhere and publishing a series of revelatory books on Soviet history and visual culture, and the use and abuse of photography, including The Commissar Vanishes and Red Star Over Russia.

King passed away last year, aged 73, and his collection was bought by Tate. This month, to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Tate Modern is opening ‘Red Star Over Russia: A Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55’, drawing on just some of King’s 250,000-piece strong Soviet stockpile.

King first visited the Soviet Union in 1970, hunting background material for an article about the centenary of Lenin’s birth. He was already an admirer of Soviet Constructivist design, this before the cult of Aleksandr Rodchenko. (King was in many ways central to the development of that cult. He worked with David Elliott at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford on a groundbreaking Rodchenko show in the late 1970s. The curator of the Tate exhibition, Matthew Gale, says King tired of the associations, though the influence on his work was clear. ‘He went a bit off the boil with Rodchenko,’ Gale says. ‘He thought that Gustav Klutsis was doing things that were even more exciting. But you can see how magazines like The Face came out in the wake of the interest in that period, filtered through things like The Sunday Times Magazine. That is another spiral of history on top of all the others in the exhibition.’) King was also a Trotsky obsessive. He began collecting as much Trotsky-related material as he could then spread out, making contacts in Russia, eastern Europe but also in the US and Mexico and developing a kind of mythology around his detective work. ‘He could spin a good story,’ says Gale, ‘and you think about story and history sometimes.’

Gale first collaborated with King 15 years ago. He says the importance of the collection is not just its depth and breadth but King’s particular way in. ‘There is something about that single-mindedness and his visual take that make it a particular thing,’ he says. ‘At the beginning, there was a fascination with the rich design culture of the 1920s and 1930s, not just in Russia but also Germany. And that clearly influenced the way he designed things. But he also had that collector’s bug. He needed to get everything. Up until he died, he was still trying to complete collections of obscure Russian magazines.’

The exhibition pulls in art and design from Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Klutsis and Nina Vatolina. It also covers the Bolshevik ‘agitprop’ trains, mural-splashed travelling PR machines aimed at explaining the goals and means of the new government. And more broadly at how much public art, from propaganda posters to monumental sculptures to street performance, was a feature of Soviet life in its first optimistic flush. But it also looks at its souring and the terrors of Stalinisation. There are stark mug shots of those dragged to the Moscow show trials and off to the Gulags or the gallows.

As Gale says, in some ways the exhibition is also about the particular power of paper, print and effective design; of posters, pamphlets, magazines and flyers to, as the saying went, ‘educate, agitate, organise’. It is a power hard to imagine now. And these are traces easily lost, forgotten or denied. ‘It is vulnerable material – because people just throw it out or because others actively want to suppress it. This is exactly what King was hoarding. He has some flyers that were thrown out of the back of the lorries at the moment of the revolution. These are not things that readily survive.’ The show is also about photography, its unique charge and abuse in a repressive state. And again there are resonances to pick up on. ‘Some of King’s work was about people being photoshopped out of history and that is so easily done now. Does that mean we are able to wipe people from history?’

Gale admits that there are losses and gains in moving King’s collection from a domestic to an institutional setting. ‘His house was an extraordinary place. And if you went to visit him and he thought of something he wanted to show you, he could just pull it out and tell you what page it was on. Part of the impact of his death, apart from the personal one, was this sudden vacuum of knowledge. The collection has morphed into this thing that has an institutional apparatus, going from warm to cold I suppose. But we have this amazing public resource now, something we can keep revisiting.’

As originally featured in the November 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*224)

INFORMATION

‘Red Star Over Russia: a Revolution in Visual Culture 1905-55’ is on view until 18 February 2018. For more information, visit the Tate Modern website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

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Two heads are better than one – and six legs are better than two, or at least, that’s what art collective Superflex think.

The Danish trio have filled the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern – and beyond – with rows of three-seater swings, the latest Hyundai Commission unveiled at the London gallery this week. The interactive, giant playground, which also features a monumental pendulum, will have more than 3 million visitors swinging at the Tate Modern until April.

The ambitious interactive work engages not only with the industrial past of the Turbine Hall, but with the current socio-political crisis. ‘Given the enormous challenges of our times it’s difficult to see how we can make an impact as individuals,’ says Superflex co-founder Bjørnstjerne Christiansen on the concept for the commission.

‘When you swing alone, you feel gravity, you feel freedom — but when you swing in three, you have to balance, you have to collaborate to make it work, to get the motion, and then you experience a force that is much greater than with one person,’ Christiansen adds. ‘It’s the core of the whole installation, three people as a collaborative, collective power.’

Superflex join some of the world’s leading artists who have transformed the 85ft high space since 2000, including Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Carsten Höller and Olafur Eliasson. The collective’s work—titled One, Two, Three, Swing!—will extend out of the public space and into the urban landscape, and eventually, it’s hoped, even out of London.

The artists hope to send a positive message about the power of working together, physically and psychically. ‘We have spent 25 years working as three people, passing that on as an entity, it’s what we believe in. Doing things with other people from the start, to challenge our own identity, who we are and what we can achieve, in different constellations, is key to being a citizen,’ Christiansen told us.

The enormous, mirrored pendulum, gently swinging from the ceiling, also allows visitors some downtime for quiet, horizontal thought (you’re invited to lie down on colourful carpets below), something the artists see an essential, and part of the process to change. ‘In the UK you have a kind of identity crisis, with Brexit and the consequences of that, and surely that creates an apathy around what we can do. But we need apathy and contemplation to be able to activate, to be part of movement and of a movement,’ Christiansen explains.

From there, a factory production line will assemble the swing seats on the spot. ‘We want to motivate people to think about what’s going on,’ he says. ‘We’re optimistic about collective power — every system is a construction, historic facts based on human actions, so that means we can challenge them on every level.’

INFORMATION

‘One Two Three Swing!’ is on view until 2 April 2018. For more information, visit the Tate website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

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Something has been brewing outside the Switch House. From our perch at Wallpaper* HQ – located directly opposite Tate Modern – we've seen a flurry of activity on the South Terrace. Early this week, somewhat disconcertingly, great clouds of white smoke began billowing from the curved parameter walls, punctuated by a series of alien white lights.

It turns out, it wasn't the landing of some extra-terrestrial space ship. Technical staff were testing a major new installation from 83-year-old Japanese fog-sculptor Fujiko Nakaya, which launches officially today. Nakaya, who first came to prominence through her collaboration with Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) in 1970, has been working with water vapour for over 40 years. Her misty moments have adorned bridges in Bristol, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and Philip Johnson's Glass House. This particular amorphous work acts as a barometer, reading shifts in atmospheric conditions – sometimes producing a faint mist, other times rocketing out great puffs of smoke. Of the work, Nakaya says: 'Nature controls herself. I try and let nature speak.'

Like all great fogs, Nakaya's work is concealing something. Underneath, in the Switch House Tanks, performative works are already installed. Hosted by artist in residence Isabel Lewis, the curated programme of live events – dubbed 'Ten Days Six Nights' – begins today. Lewis has transformed the usually stark Tanks Foyer into a kind of Brutalist botanical garden; a serene surrounding in which Lewis will welcome visitors, microphone in hand, while conceptual dancers perform around her.

At this point, performance art naysayers might head to the bar (or out onto the terrace to be consumed by the fog). But the programme of events is so diverse, there's bound to be something for everyone. Spread among the atmospheric South Tank, East Tank and Transformer Galleries, artists range in age (from 32 to 83), nationality (from Japan to the Dominican Republic) and work in every conceivable media. Even the most miserable skeptics will raise an eyebrow to Lorenzo Senni's funky neon trance installation.

It's a wide reaching project, in line with the institution's ambitious itinerary of 'Tate Live' events, which began in 2012. But, says director of exhibitions Achim Borchardt-Hume, it's essential to an institution's programming to feature live art. It's what the public want. 'In our connected, digital age, artists and audiences are ever more fascinated by live experiences, shared in the moment with those around them.' With this in mind, to fully appreciate 'Tate Live' events, we suggest you throw caution to the mist, and join in.

INFORMATION

'Ten Days Six Nights' is on view until 2 April. For more information, visit the Tate Modern website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
SE1 9TG

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There was much art-world hype earlier in the year about Robert Rauschenberg's famously fragile Monogram goat travelling to London for the first time in two decades. It was posited as a lynchpin in Tate Modern's anticipated Rauschenberg retrospective – another UK first since the great American artist passed away in 2008.

Kneeling down next to the beast, looking into Monogram's glassy eyes, he was worth the 20-year wait. There's humorous absurdity in his vacant expression, his chin hairs matted in a rainbow seal of oil paint. But there's also something mournful. He's suspended in a ridiculous tyre belt, to be ogled by visitors. Monogram began life as a $15 stuffed animal at a used furniture store. Since then, he's had quite the life. Like many of the artist's renowned Combines, Monogram developed various appendages over a number of years. At one stage, he was mounted on a vertical canvas before being slotted inside the rubber tyre for which he's now known. As Rauschenberg said, the tyre and the goat 'lived happily ever after'.

A little like his Combines, Rauschenberg was continually adding appendages and arms to his practice, driven by an insatiable curiosity with materials. Each chapter of his six-decade career (including his silkscreen period, live performances, technology and material abstraction) has a dedicated room in the exhibition. This change of mediums and methods mirrors the artist's moving physical locations. He toured, holidayed and journeyed extensively – most famously to Cuba, Spain, Italy and Morocco with Cy Twombly in the 1950s. As Tate's director of exhibitions Achim Borchardt-Hume says, 'he saw the experience of art as inseparable from the experience of life'.

The exhibition starts with Rauschenberg's early experiments at Black Mountain College, in a room overwhelmed by monochrome. It's as if colour couldn't be introduced yet, because Rauschenberg was too preoccupied by texture. These early works have a simplicity, an air of cool and a material playfulness that lay the foundations for his future work. A renowned early collaboration with John Cage, Automobile Tyre Print (1953) hints at what's to come from Rauschenberg's performative work. Here, Rauschenberg laid page upon page of typewriter paper on a driveway, and asked Cage to run over them in his car, with ink on the wheel. As Rauschenberg said at the time, Cage was 'both the printer and the press'.

The idea of repurposing and using objects that are already lying around (as seen in this early use of a car and typewriter paper) went on to define Rauschenberg's practice, and help redefine the landscape of American art. Rauschenberg used the objects of life: boots, paint pot lids, desk fans and, perhaps most importantly, newspaper clippings. He embedded a radio into one of his Combines, with the dials still showing, so that visitors could choose the station. In this sense, the audience – the users of these essential life objects – was as much a part of his work as the materials were. 

Rauschenberg's choreographic pieces (here represented by a host of archival material, photographs, projections and film) grew in direct relation to his sculptures and paintings. Though static, his silkscreens have the same energy and life that his dances do; framed against a wall, his later fabric swathes ripple like flags when a visitor walks by too closely.

Despite the vast spectrum of the artist's work, each phase bares his distinct signature. What this exhibition does so cleverly is to simply allow this genius to unfold. Chronologically, without fuss, or unnecessary embellishment, the Tate has allowed Rauschenberg's work to speak for itself. Any art world hype is wholeheartedly justified.

INFORMATION
’Robert Rauschenberg’ is on view until 2 April 2017. For more information, visit the Tate Modern website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

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When Herzog and de Meuron’s highly anticipated Switch House extension opened at the Tate Modern in June this year, the cavernous Turbine Hall that was once a ‘dead end’ within the museum became its heart; a space that leads visitors across from the original riverside building to the new galleries.

It was a change of circulation that was closely observed by the Hall’s latest resident, French artist Philippe Parreno, whose installation Anywhen opens today as the second in a new series of annual site-specific Turbine Hall commissions sponsored by Hyundai.

A master of the immersive, Parreno is the perfect candidate to take on the halls’ cavernous space – he was famously the first artist to take on all 22,000 sq m at the Palais de Tokyo in 2013 and just last year he filled New York’s gargantuan Park Avenue Armory with his show, 'H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS’.

‘There has never been a project that has used the Turbine Hall in this way,’ says Tate assistant curator Vassilis Oikonomopoulos of Parreno’s typically immersive installation, ‘not topologically, not technically or even architecturally.’

Keen to extract elements of the Hall and integrate them into his ‘living’ exhibition, Parreno became the first ever artist with a Turbine commission to go and talk to the architects, visiting Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron at their offices in Basel in order to better understand the design of the space.

The result is an exhibition that sees Parreno ‘playing’ the Hall like an instrument, so that visitors approaching from all entrances can't help but be drawn into the spectacle. As music and sound designed by Nicolas Becker with Cengiz Hartlap blares out, the Turbine’s light boxes flash in time, a temporary cinema space gracefully drops down from the ceiling and a shoal of inflatable fish float serenely past. A ghost-like white marquee – a familiar accoutrement from the Parreno toolbox – is installed on the Turbine Hall’s Level 1 bridge alongside a moving spotlight (made in collaboration with Liam Gillick) that snakes through the hall on a rail casting beautiful shadows as it goes. Elsewhere, the outside is brought inside in the form of daylight from the Hall’s towering windows as well as live sounds that have been recorded on microphones placed in and around the building.

The suspended cinema space, that consists of one vast screen, a grid of speakers and a series of vertical and horizontal acoustic panels engineered by Kvadrat, glides up and down in various configurations, occasionally stopping to show one of two films including a new hypnotic work that features underwater footage of a brilliant bioluminescent cuttlefish as well as a performance by ventriloquist Nina Conti.

Here, beneath the suspended cinema, visitors are encouraged to stop and sit on the specially-installed carpet; to take a moment to get lost in the experience, creating what the artist calls a ‘temporary community’. ‘The fact that it’s a free exhibition changes the perspective,’ says Oikonomopoulos. ‘The opportunities are much bigger for creating a more diverse community. It won’t just be your typical museum visitors here; unexpected types of people will come in that have no idea about Philippe or his work.’

Another defining feature of Anywhen is that, unlike previous Parreno exhibitions, there will be no loop of planned sequences. Instead its form will be more organic, constantly changing throughout the day and even over the course of its six-month lifespan so that every visitor has a new experience. This is, in part, due to a mysterious bioreactor that is installed at the back of the hall.

Conceived and engineered by scientists Jean-Baptiste Boulé and Nicolas Desprat, the bioreactor was first introduced by Parreno as part of ‘IF THIS THEN ELSE’, an exhibition held earlier this year at the Gladstone Gallery. Connected to sensors on the roof and within the hall, the laboratory set-up, which can be viewed through a glass screen, is fed information about changes in light and humidity. In response to the data, the microorganisms within the bioreactor create patterns that will then trigger sequences of movement within the space.

As a whole, the effect is beguiling; like being inside a disorientating collage made up of layers of natural and artificial sound and light that eradicate any sense of perspective or scale. ‘We had no idea how poetic it would be and how many surprises we would have,’ says Oikonomopoulos of the six-week installation process. ‘When there are so many elements and they finally come together the combination of them often left us speechless.’

INFORMATION

'Hyundai Commission: Philippe Parreno', supported by Kvadrat, is on view until 2 April 2017. For more information, visit the Tate Modern's website.

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London, SE1 9TG

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In line with the much anticipated Herzog & de Meuron extension (itself celebrated with the graphic representation by Peter Saville with Paul Hetherington and Morph,) Tate has given its logo, online branding and merchandising a rejuvenating lick of paint.

Tate Design Studio enlisted the help of London-based branding specialists North to reconfigure the museum's typographic expression. North decided early on that starting from scratch simply wasn't necessary. Jeremy Coysten, North partner explains, 'For us to propose getting rid of the identity system entirely would be irresponsible and a selfish act as designers. Instead, we built on the existing brand equity, refreshed and strengthened what was working well.'

Tate's highly recognisable logo was one of those branding aspects that 'just worked.' After looking into implementing an alternative, North decided to retain the logo's custom typeface, 'Tate Pro', but to control its usage more carefully.

Previously, Tate employed multiple versions of the logo, including both lower-case and capital letter options, along with versions with multiple font weights, aiming to visually promote the museum's 'Look again, Think again' philosophy. However, the new, streamlined system makes use of just one, consolidated logo, that succeeds across print, digital media and merchandising. This new concept also hopes to unify all four Tate locations (Tate Britain, Liverpool, St Ives, as well as Tate Modern).

We've already seen this new, colourful branding in full swing in Switch House's UXUS-designed Tate Modern shop. The vibrant, largely primary palette was chosen from the Tate Members commission by artist Martin Creed. These colourways will be refreshed every few years in collaboration with a new artist. So, just like the adaptable, modular retail experience, the updated visual identity has the capacity to evolve with the museum.

At such an exciting, busy time for the organisation, Tate's CMO Rob Baker took time to add, 'What North have created has allowed us to realise the potential of the current identity, ensuring it can exist seamlessly across all platforms in a confident and expressive way.' Confident is right. The new look is bravely simple, subtly achieved and quietly effective – it sees in the monumental Switch House opening with characteristic Tate class.

Jeremy Coysten, North partner explains, 'For us to propose getting rid of the identity system entirely would be irresponsible and a selfish act as designers. Instead, we built on the existing brand equity, refreshed and strengthened what was working well'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Tate’s website

Photography: North

Tate Modern opens its much anticipated Herzog & de Meuron extension, called Switch House, this weekend. We advise that you exit through the gift shop, captured on film here

There was a buzz around Bankside this morning as Tate Modern's Herzog & de Meuron extension opened its doors to press, en masse. At the top of the grandiose, central concrete staircase, we find the new Tate store, double height and stretching to an impressive 500 sq m. George Gottl of the Netherlands-based consumer experience agency UXUS walked Wallpaper* around.

'We've thought about every detail,' he explains. 'From the women's accessory displays, to the bespoke bookshelves to the t-shirt mannequins.' With such a broad range of items in stock, creating a fluid and unifying shop floor was essential. 'Every unit you see here is on wheels,' Gottl adds, pushing a towering display cabinet, attached to an exposed, industrial runner. 'So, as the exhibitions and needs of the museum change, the store can be continually adjusted to fit. I think of it like a marketplace, with stalls that can be completely dismantled and reconfigured, depending on the product they're selling.'

Even the lighting is 'permanently temporary' – it moves with the shelves. Discreet LED strips are embedded into the framework of the modular units, shining a spotlight on each item. 'When the strip lights are switched off, it's amazing how different the space looks,' Gottl notes. 'But when they're on, the store feels more like an extension of the gallery space, giving each object an even more premium feel – so the customer might be pleasantly surprised by the price tag.'

The store stocks similar items to the existing River shop (postcards, mugs, art supplies) but there is a heightened focus on limited edition art books and prints, which occupy a library-sized shelving unit across the back wall.

Splashes of colour come courtesy of the dedicated children's area, which benefits from padded, child-sized cubbyholes carved directly into the bookshelf – perfect resting places for kids, after a long tour of the now gargantuan museum. Elsewhere, things feel rather more grown-up, with powder-coated steel fixings, Tate-typical concrete floors and accents of darkened wood.

The excitement of the opening day is infectious, and Gottl's passion for the project is clear. 'Working closely with Tate Modern's enterprise team, we realised the importance of the store in generating income for the not-for-profit gallery,' he concludes. 'We have always admired Tate for its visionary approach – it has been an enormous honour to be part of the team that is making that vision a reality.'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Tate Modern website

Photography courtesy UXUS and Tate

ADDRESS

Bankside, London SE1 9TG

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On the bank of the River Thames, a steel-structured power house draws millions of visitors from across the globe every year. Its brick façade, towering chimney and imposing industrial form instantly mark it out as the Tate Modern, the world’s most popular platform for modern and contemporary art.

The gallery is housed in the former Bankside Power Station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott between 1947 and 1963 before being decommissioned in 1981. The building lay dormant for over a decade until Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were selected to convert it into a national museum of art. Since Tate Modern’s official launch in 2000, the building has played a key role in transforming the once-deserted Bankside area into a bustling hub. And now Herzog and de Meuron are leading Tate Modern into a new era with a large-scale extension, set to open this month.

Herzog and de Meuron are renowned worldwide for their long list of architectural accomplishments; adept at harnessing a site’s existing character, their designs demonstrate a highly articulated use of materials with frequently complex, consistently intriguing explorations of space and shape. Standouts include the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing and the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, with the Tate Modern widely recognised as one of their most high-profile works. ‘It’s amazing how the Tate has grown – it’s a totally different institution now,’ says Herzog. ‘It has transformed Bankside, making it a city in itself.’

Five million people now annually flock to a museum designed to accommodate just two, while the Tate Modern’s collection has expanded by over 50 per cent since its 2000 launch. Unsurprisingly, this led to an urgent need for space. The new development, called the Switch House, has been designed to help visitors engage better with art, providing additional areas for learning, discussion and new media, as well as the collections themselves. It also marks the latest phase in Tate Modern’s ongoing evolution, which started with the completion of The Tanks in 2012 (this underground space, dedicated to live art and performance, briefly opened to the public before closing to reopen together with the Switch House this June). Located on the museum’s south side, the new Switch House rises from Level 0. ‘Adding a building to an existing structure is always a challenge for an architect – especially when it is a successful museum building designed by the same architect,’ muses Herzog. 

De Meuron factors in the issue of building a museum for the 21st century: ‘It should not be a flashy piece of architecture – it is not more important than the art itself.’ Clad in brick, this ten-storey building towers over the original gallery, effectively doubling the exhibition space. Its angular design creates an extraordinary form reminiscent of a pyramid. ‘It took us a while before we understood that brick was the right material,’ says Herzog. ‘Brick is archaic and physical; it speaks to you. The existing and new parts become one thing, not a collection of competing objects.’ De Meuron agrees: ‘It has its own identity and power.’

The façade of the Switch House references Gilbert Scott’s original brickwork, but actually evolves to become a kind of cutting-edge veil, blurring the boundaries between exterior and interior space. ‘The lattice lends the building an almost textile feel while maintaining an industrial look,’ explains Herzog. Other new features include open urban spaces and dedicated areas for learning and socialising. Perhaps most spectacular of all is the Switch House’s tenth-floor terrace, giving visitors a 360-degree view of London and perfectly framing the dome of St Paul’s.

Inside, raw concrete creates drama with folded forms. The cavernous Turbine Hall becomes the heart of the gallery, creating a kind of symmetry between the old and new buildings, a unity that is accentuated by the addition of a bridge that connects the two spaces. ‘The new building has a more organic, fluid spatial organisation, whereas the existing part is more linear in its build-up,’ says Herzog. ‘Together they make for a more complete experience for visitors to discover art – but also for curators to display art in different ways’.

And what of the art? The extension adds approximately 21,000 sq m of display space, which will showcase more than 250 artists from 50 different countries. The museum’s permanent collection will be rehung, as new acquisitions are showcased from Latin America, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East – works by Mark Rothko, Henri Matisse and Agnes Martin will join the likes of Sheela Gowda and Meschac Gaba for the first time. Additionally, a floor in the Switch House will house the Tate Exchange, a new platform for external organisations to engage with the gallery about global issues. German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans was on-site throughout the development, capturing each stage in a series of 176 shots. 

A Tate Artist Trustee from 2009–2014, and scheduled for a major retrospective in 2017, Tillmans feels this is a project close to his heart. ‘It is an incredibly intricate design; I was in awe of the task and the people who made it happen,’ he says. Turning his lens on building paraphernalia like scaffolding, walkie-talkies and sacks of cement, Tillmans manipulated his shots on an old photocopier that produces a single colour image after scanning a picture four times, ‘distorting and shifting the colours so that each one is a unique work’. These striking shots create a unique perspective, elevating the complexity of the construction into a ‘beautiful spectacle’ using layers of abstraction. 

Tate Modern has described the new gallery extension as ‘the most important cultural building to open in the UK for almost two decades’. Is it possible that it could elevate the museum from popular art attraction to vital new London icon? ‘Does it become an important ingredient for an area to grow? That’s the noblest aspect of architecture,’ Herzog fires back. ‘The expansion will make the whole building more interesting, with more options for art lovers as well as for those who want to enjoy the institution’s special atmosphere. 

'If it works, then yes, it can become an icon in a generation or two.’ After a pause, de Meuron adds: ‘It is a society that makes a building interesting through time.’

As originally featured in the July 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*208)

Since Tate Modern’s official launch in 2000, the building has played a key role in transforming the once-deserted Bankside area into a bustling hub. Now, Herzog and de Meuron are leading Tate Modern into a new era with a large-scale extension, the construction of which was captured on a time lapse film from Wallpaper* HQ. Photography: Wolfgang Tillmans. Videography: Lobster Pictures

INFORMATION

Tate Modern’s Switch House opens to the public on 17 June. For more information, visit Tate Modern’s website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London, SE1 9TG

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We’ve been following the developments at the Tate Modern’s ongoing extension keenly – and not least because our London HQ conveniently overlooks the site. This is famously one of the world’s most visited galleries of contemporary and modern art, and a prime London cultural destination since the former Bankside Power Station’s transformation by Swiss duo Herzog & de Meuron opened its doors at the turn of the millennium.

Now, 16 years later, Herzog & de Meuron have returned to the site, adding a much-needed extension to the original brick structure built by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott prior to his death in 1960. Design development in the new wing began in 2009 and, come June this year, the building will throw open its doors to the public for the first time since the sneak peak offered by the brief reveal of the Tate tank galleries back in 2012.

This move will allow the Tate to display much more of its growing collection. Four floors of the new wing will be dedicated to exhibitions from the permanent collection, while, for the moment at least, temporary shows will remain in their original spaces.

The Tanks will also reopen and, spanning ten floors above them, the new extension will include a restaurant and bar, office space, the aforementioned galleries, a members room, and an accessible panoramic viewing level at the very top.

The fifth floor will play host to Tate’s latest special project – the Tate Exchange. This innovative space will be dedicated to ’exploring wider social issues through art’, explains the art institution. The Tate describes the Exchange as a ’modern experiment’, which will provide space for interactive events and dialogue between artists, associates and the public.

The Tate Modern extension will launch on 17 June with a special weekend program of music, film, tours, workshops and events throughout the building.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Herzog & de Meuron website

Unless you're Kate Moss, having your picture taken can be an uncomfortable experience. We overcompensate by falling back on awkward half-smiles and girly duck-pouts. Whatever your grimace of choice, posing for a photograph is an innately performative act. With this in mind, Tate Modern's major spring exhibition questions what it means to say 'cheese'.

'Performing for the Camera' leaps straight into the golden age of performance art, with Yves Klein's famous image Leap into the Void. Emphasising the staged trickery of the photograph, the curators have chosen to position the 'making of' images alongside the seminal shot. Here, it is revealed Klein isn't actually leaping to his death – a group of subsequently edited-out friends are nervously waiting to catch him in a sheet.

This photograph, along with dozens of others featured in the first half of the show, come from a collection donated to Tate last year by photographers Harry Shunk and János Kender. Now, the walls of the gallery tell tales of the couple's obsession with live performance art. Bodies twist, dance and peacock, and their cameras are the audience.

As the show progresses, the performative aspect of the images gets more and more disrupted, and difficult to define. We journey through obscure byways of performance portraiture's history – passing holiday snaps taken from relatively unknown photographers, alongside defining images from the likes of Joseph Beuys and Francesca Woodman.

Despite this broad scope of images, a sense of humour unites the exhibition – much of it centred around nudity. This is expressed in Jimmy De Sana's Marker Cones, where he is pictured strutting on all fours, with what looks like party hats on his hands and feet. But on-camera performance doesn't just mean jumping off buildings and clowning around naked. As much as the exhibition is united by levity, a darker undertone sneaks in, through Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase's quiet, muted images of himself in a tepid-looking bathtub. He performs loneliness just as evocatively as De Sana performs comedy.

Fukase isn't the only artist posing for his own images. A whole room in the gallery is devoted to the 'Self / Portrait' – where photographers perform on both sides of the camera. As selfie-culture becomes ingrained, more and more gallery space is being given up to the trend. We've already seen Amalia Ulman's Instagram-focused 'Excellences & Perfection' in London this month at the Whitechapel Gallery. She appears again here, flouting her own ironic brand of voyeurstic sexuality in that all too familiar mirror pose, iPhone camera in hand.

A selfie was also picked as the principle advertising image for the exhibition – and it has been plastered all over London. The picture is taken from Romain Mader's staged series that depicts him clumsily posing with mail-order brides. He explains his reasoning for making himself the protagonist: 'It's too easy to mock people. It's better to pose myself and be the main character in my work. This way, there's irony and vulnerability.' 

Mader's sentiment rings true throughout the exhibition – as much as the highly performative images of theatric, extrovert bodies are beautiful and striking, the portraits that stick with us are those that reveal an honest, relatable vulnerability.

INFORMATION

'Performing for the Camera' is on view until 12 June. For more information, visit Tate Modern's website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London, SE1 9TG

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Property developer Harry Handelsman, founder of the Manhattan Loft Company, has altered London’s urban topography forever. This isn’t just a bold proclamation or a fizzy, corporate sound-bite but a physical, bricks and mortar reality. 

Rightly credited for introducing the concept of New York style warehouse living to the UK with the Manhattan Loft Corporation – co-founded with business partner John Hitchcox back in 1992 – he’s since been the creative force behind the redevelopment of the Gothic cathedral to rail travel that is the St Pancras Hotel, celebrity honey trap the Chiltern Firehouse, Ealing Studios and the proposed Hackney Fashion Hub retail outlet. 'What I do is change city landscapes,' he says. 'People walk past my buildings every day for years, for decades and decades to come, and see what I have done. I think there’s a real value to that.'

He also puts his money where his mouth is, personally occupying the impressive panorama-view penthouse apartment at Bankside Lofts, observing the once unloved and run down area undergo a gradual but profound rebirth. Cranes and heavy construction are now a fixture in the area; the curvy, custard-yellow, Piers Gough-designed building is now a close neighbour to both Wallpaper's Southwark HQ and Tate Modern (and its incredible Herzog & de Meuron extension). But 20 years ago it was a dump. 'It was very exciting to live in an area on the up, a total buzz to watch the area grow and regenerate,' says Handelsman. But despite Bankside Lofts’ proximity to Blackfriars, the City and the West End, not everyone was convinced his investment would pay off.

'Every time I've invested in a new area there have been people who have laughed at me,' he says. 'People even told me that Clerkenwell (where he developed MLC’s first loft living concept, buying an old print works for just £435,000 back in 1992) was ‘too far away from anything’ to be successful, when it’s actually just a walk away from the West End!'

Handelsman left his riverside apartment a few years ago, 'when the 4X4s started to outnumber the kids on BMX bikes'. He now lives in a house near Hyde Park.

Now, with Bankside Lofts currently celebrating its 20th birthday, Handelsman has moved back in, using the ground floor space to showcase his biggest project to date; Manhattan Loft Gardens, a 42-storey, double-cantilevered luxury residential tower with expansive living spaces, three sky gardens and a seven-storey design hotel, due for completion in 2018 in Stratford, east London.

Handelsman is bold and unabashedly proud of his soaring (sometimes lateral) achievements, describing the Bankside Lofts, for instance, as 'the catalyst for London’s South Bank regeneration... significant to the history of London'. His manifesto for the Manhattan Loft Gardens skyscraper is similarly bullish. 'Europe’s most ambitious residential tower... a new chapter in high rise, shaping the next generation of living,' he states.

The main inspiration for the Stratford tower came from all the bad examples of generic, soullessly cloud-busting architecture he saw on his travels in America and the Far East. And in East London. 'All these miserable, phallic downtown high-rises. Lots of glass office buildings but none of them built for people to really live in. It is sad, but a lot of very well respected architects do some very bad buildings.'

So, Harry went to the SOM partnership (responsible for Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower, New Your City’s One World Trade Center and Beijing’s Greenland Dawangjing Tower) and said, 'design me the best tower in the world, the most striking residential structure in London. Don’t worry about the expense. Let’s just work on a concept for now.'

SOM came back with a terracotta and glass, Jenga stack conception; lush, quasi-Babylonian 'sky gardens' cut into its sides at three levels. Clearly inspired by his experiences in boutique hotel management during the launch of the Chiltern Firehouse with partner André Balazs (Handelsman should be awarded hotelier of the year – even though 'he’s not a hotelier' wrote Sunday Times and Wallpaper* contributor John Arlidge) he’ll be running the Stratford project himself.

'Crucially, there will be just one entrance, for both hotel guests and residents,' he explains. 'The idea is to create a community and encourage social interaction. In most modern developments people don’t mix, they don’t interact, even though they are the kind of people that want to be a member of a certain club and go to the right restaurant – it is quite bizarre that the same spirit isn’t carried over into residential life.'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Manhattan Loft Gardens’ website

ADDRESS

Bankside Lofts
65 Hopton Street
London, SE1 9JL

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The London-based architecture and design collective Assemble have won this year's Turner Prize. 

The prestigious award – previously bestowed upon Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Damien Hirst, among others – celebrates and champions artists under the age of 50 working in the UK. This year's winners were revealed at Glasgow's Tramway last night, the announcement made by artist Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon. 

Assemble, known for their community-based projects and architectural approach, scooped the prize for their work with residents of the Granby Four Street in Liverpool — a group of terraced houses built around 1900, which residents have been fighting to save from demolition for the past decade. Other notable projects of the 18-strong collective include 'Underline', Transport for London's contemporary art initiative which will see them unleash their creativity on Seven Sisters tube station in 2016, and the popular Brutalist Playground at the RIBA.

The top accolade earns the group £25,000, while fellow nominees – British multimedia artist Bonnie Camplin, Canadian audio and performance artist Janice Kerbel; and German sculptor, installation, and collage artist Nicole Wermers – receive £5,000 each. All will feature in a group exhibition that will be on view until 17 January, 2016 at the Tate.