The ninth annual Hyundai Commission sees Korean artist Mire Lee transform the turbine hall in London’s Tate Modern into the innards of a seemingly living factory. Lee—who lives and works between Seoul and Amsterdam—uses industrial materials such as metal, concrete and silicone to create installation art that teeters between sensuality and grotesquery. Her intervention harkens back to the Tate Modern building’s former life as the Bankside Power Station (1891–1981), where workers operated machines in oppressive conditions in order to produce electricity. The exhibition, titled Open Wound, is on from October 9, 2024 –March 16, 2025, and is curated by Alvin Li, curator, international art at Tate Modern, along with Bilal Akkouche, assistant curator. The two join STIR for an interview that explores the project in greater depth.
The Bankside Power Station was built and operated by the City of London Electric Lighting Company (CLELCo) just half a century after the Industrial Revolution (1760 –1840). It was set up on the south bank of the River Thames and supplied power to London. The station saw rapid mechanisation, and over its lifespan, the people who worked there were gradually replaced by machinery. However, this was not enough to keep up with evolving industrial standards in England, and the station would receive several complaints for the air pollution it caused. Eventually, Bankside Power Station was deemed to be inefficient and was decommissioned, with the Tate Gallery announcing in 1994 that it would be taking over the premises. The process of converting a power plant to a museum was completed in January 2000, sparking the transformation of the surrounding district.
Lee’s large-scale installation takes us back to the time when Tate Modern’s turbine hall was filled with rumbling machinery, but it distorts history in order to blur the role of human beings and machinery in Bankside Power Station’s operations through the use of silicone ‘flesh’ and metal. Lee has created a turbine in the centre of the hall; it spins slowly and discharges fluid into trays placed below it. Elsewhere, ‘skins’ are hung out to dry and harden in regular maintenance sessions. Visitors to the art gallery can imagine these skins being prepared and collected, to then be shipped out for sale to consumers. Akkouche tells STIR, “Open Wound proposes a dialogue between organic and mechanical physicalities by intertwining soft, fleshy forms with rigid industrial machinery within the concept of an ‘industrial womb’.”
Lee’s suggestion of flesh and metal melding reminds us of the human cost of industrial production and the inevitable injuries (and loss of life) that are surely sustained in the process. Open Wound (2024) is grand in scale and quite frightening, in the same vein as the body horror expressed by films such as Videodrome (1983) by David Cronenberg and The Thing (1982) by John Carpenter. As an exhibition note suggests, the installation artist is well aware of the contradictory emotions that Open Wound elicits and embraces these, inviting us to revel in our awe and disgust as we encounter her work.
Beyond the human cost of labour, Lee’s art installation at Tate Modern also creates a conversation around production and consumption. As the curator explains, museums are a new kind of factory in our “contemporary experience economy”. He tells STIR, “In a way, the commission symbolically encapsulates century-long transformations in industrial production. It leaves an open question: What is it that the museum generates today?”
Lee’s commissioned project at Tate Modern is awe-inspiring and unsettling at once; it is likely to remain with viewers long after experiencing the project. The sheer scale of her work projects a sense of overwhelming pathos, leaving us to think of the countless lives that—in a poetic sense—have become one with machines through industrial production.
—Manu Sharma
