Tania Bruguera's 10,148,451 is a case for mass empathy - Review
For the 2018 Hyundai Commission at the Tate's Turbine Hall, Tania Bruguera is challenging an absence of feeling through what she calls ‘political-timing specific art’.
Artist Tania Bruguera stands on the heat-sensitive floor of her Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern. Image: Guy Bell/Rex/Shutterstock.
You see a stranger crying. How do you react? Do you comfort them, or look the other way? Perhaps a feeling of empathy compels you to band together with others to offer support. But wait, their tears were only induced by an organic compound which permeates a room off the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. It is one of a few subtle interventions, along with a large heat-sensitive floor and low frequency soundscape, installed for Tania Bruguera’s 2018 Hyundai Commission. The changing numeric title is an ever-increasing figure: the number of people who migrated from one country to another, added to the number of migrant deaths recorded so far this year - indicating the sheer scale of mass migration and the risks involved.
The mass movement of people is one of the largest stories of our time. As we witness the highest levels of migration on records, we also experience a steep waning of political acceptance toward migration since the end of the second world war. An anti-immigration response by governments strengthens and despite constantly encountering footage of people making treacherous journeys to escape conflict in the hope of finding safety, a mass apathy by citizens is palpable. In response, Bruguera is challenging this absence of feeling and makes the case for empathy, en masse, through what she calls ‘political-timing specific art’.
The Turbine Hall is a colossal space, and at first glance, it does appear empty aside from the black thermochronimic ink floor. A large portrait of Syrian refugee Yousef, who received support from SE1, now studies medicine and works for the NHS, can be revealed when visitors simultaneously warm the floor with their bodies. Next door, a tear-inducing gas which smells like vaporised menthol crystals literally forces visitors to cry. In the meantime, thirty subwoofers create an unnerving atmosphere as they emit a low-frequency rumble designed by Steve Goodman, known as Kode9.
The exhibition is scattered, and an absent focal point is exactly what makes it effective. Rather than collectively gazing at a monument to contemplate civic responsibility, visitors enter the space and see each other. Together, they can be seen removing footwear to lie across the floor and wiping uncontrollable tears induced by the ‘crying room’. The exhibition even enters their phones: a manifesto, which automatically appears when logging on to the Tate Wifi network, asks visitors to engage with the lives of those in their neighbourhoods, wherever they come from. In this space, strangers become neighbours and must confront the question of visibility in cohesion with vulnerability.
In a long term project, Tate Neighbours, a group of local SE1 residents and authors of the manifesto, collaborate under the direction of Bruguera to discuss the museum’s relationship with its local community. In another intervention, monumentalisation reappears as a theme the Tate Boiler house is renamed to honour the local activist Natalie Bell. A resident of the neighbourhood, Bell’s activism has significantly contributed to local charities that offer housing and social support for migrants.
In a country where neighbourliness is on the decline, Bruguera sees the transformative potential of collective empathy to activate direct political action. In a poignant conjunction of realism - the sobering numeric title - with an exposing space, both literally and metaphorically, visitors are invited come together to occupy and imagine. Bruguera and the Tate Neighbours are questioning institutionalised power and borders to imagine a new inclusivity. Under their influence, the Turbine Hall has become a theatre for imagining new futures, or, as Bruguera has put it herself in the past, practising in advance, through art.
10,148, 451 was at the Tate’s Turbine Hall 2 October 2018 – 24 February 2019.
