Wander into the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and you will be met by the unsettling sight of what look like flayed, bloodied skins hanging from heavy industrial chains overhead. Dozens of them, all a sickly pink, each one stretched over rusting wires.
As you progress through the hall you discover the source of these grotesque ornaments: an immense, rotating engine, draped in slithering, fleshy tentacles, dribbling a viscous red liquid over torn scraps of fabric strung beneath (the liquid then pools into a troublingly rusty vat). These freshly-made ‘skins’ are then hung to dry at the back of the hall before being hoisted into the air by ‘technicians’, creating a living exhibition that will continue to grow throughout its run.
The whole process resembles nothing more than a huge abattoir, albeit one that appears to be disconcertingly alive. South Korean artist Mire Lee’s works are concerned with the ceaseless and often frightening march of technological progress, and in the Turbine Hall she finds the perfect venue to explore her ideas.
This was once a place where men and women (mostly men) toiled in unbearable heat to feed and maintain the turbines and boilers that powered London, tending machines so vast and complex they were essentially unknowable. This installation, catchily titled Open Wound, even uses some of the original cranes and pulleys that were at work in the Tate’s past life, evoking ghosts of the past.
Lee asks wider questions, too, about our role as individuals as we hurtle through a world in which we are increasingly tiny parts in a globally interconnected system, few of us strictly necessary, all of us replaceable. Are these skins us, worn out and strung up, rinsed of value by the machine?
Yet there’s also something awe inspiring at work here, a gross magnificence to this thing far bigger than us, of which we are a part. The machine is us and we are the machine. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.
Open Wound is the Turbine Hall at its very best, using the vast, industrial magnificence of the space to pose searingly relevant questions about our place in the world.
—Steve Dinneen
