None of the five senses was as affected by the corona pandemic as the sense of smell. And not only for those who became infected and at times lost it completely, but also for most of the others: masks protect against aerosols, but at the same time prevent one from perceiving one’s surroundings olfactory. It is therefore not surprising that the first thing visitors to the Tate Modern in London – who are exempt from wearing a mask in public buildings – particularly notice these days is a scent: it smells a bit musty when you walk over the large concrete ramp up the turbine hall enters. After a wet dog or a damp dish sponge. Not uncomfortable, but unfamiliar. The nose is on again.
The smell, which will change to something sweeter over the course of the time you spend here, is not a result of poor museum hygiene. It is part of the concept of this year’s “Hyundai Commission”, which was formerly called the “Unilever Commission”, a project for which an artist has been allowed to play in this huge space in the former power station on the Thames almost every year since the turn of the millennium. Doris Salcedo let a crack run lengthways through it, Olafur Eliasson hung a sun on the front wall, Ai Weiwei piled up clay seeds. Nobody can completely fill the room, nobody can use it in all its depth and height – unless the Thames are temporarily diverted, as a British critic recently suggested.
Anicka Yi with one of her creations in the turbine hall of the Tate Modern.
(Photo: Nicky J Sims / Getty Images)
With the fragrance installation, which is part of her turbine hall project “In Love With The World”, Anicka Yi at least made extensive use of the air in the room. The changing smells are to be understood as the pheromones of those quasi-creatures she invented that float through the hall. These creatures appear in two different forms: translucent balloons in inverted teardrop shape, each with five tentacles hanging down, and cute, yellowish things that look like rudimentary heads with bulbous noses. They rise and fall, dance around each other without ever touching the ground. A courtship ritual? Foraging? Free-floating, directionless existence?
The question behind this air ballet is: How about sharing the world with machines that live in the wild and can develop on their own? The 50-year-old Korean, who enjoys working at the interface between art and science, wanted to transform the turbine hall into an ecosystem for living machines, animal cyborgs without organic elements. Yi calls these evolutionary machines “aerobes” – the thick, hot planulae, the tentacle-armored xenojellies, roughly: “foreign pudding” they say they are based on marine life and fungi. “Like the dance of a bee or the scent trail of an ant, aerobes communicate in ways that we cannot understand,” explains the Tate.
The gentle hissing, the smells, all of this dominates the huge room seemingly effortlessly
Now it is not as if there had not been attempts earlier to fill the turbine hall with suspended particles. In 2016, for example, Philippe Parreno’s installation “Anywhen” consisted partly of helium-filled foil fish. What distinguishes Yi’s project from the previous ones is the assertion of a Tamagotchi-like changeability of the strange things that rise and fall – completely harmless, by the way.
The two species, planulae and xenojellies, in their natural habitat. In the background: the maintenance area.
(Photo: TOLGA AKMEN / AFP)
In fact, the purely aesthetic impression that you get when you take enough time for the airy dance is calming, like a lava lamp or flying a kite. The gentle hissing, the smells, all of this dominates the huge room seemingly effortlessly. But the idea of a self-evolving machine population never really works. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that these creatures have to be serviced and filled with gas again and again in locked-off areas in the back of the hall that are easily visible from the traverse bridge. The illusion of their existential autonomy does not last long: they are drone-powered balloons. The tentacles of the Xenojellies have no function, just as the bulbous outgrowths of the planulae. And there is simply more to an ecosystem than two species.
In the end, this work is probably most enjoyable when it is perceived as a gentle intervention, as a pensive amusement park attraction.
Anicka Yi: In Love With the World at Tate Modern, London, until January 12, 2022.