Other sites in town and abroad are currently being envisaged. The distinctive swingsets will pop up in three other locations throughout south London, visually linking private businesses, parks, and housing blocks. Its overt inclusivity is a fundamental aspect of the project, and it speaks volumes about the museum’s priorities as a contemporary organization. One Two Three Swing! is the first Turbine Hall commission to reach beyond the institution’s walls-and the first masterminded not by an art curator, but by Tate’s Head of Regeneration and Community Partnerships, Donald Hyslop. The whole process is focusing on the power of collaboration.” “Once you’ve found your balance, you can create a much more powerful movement and a higher level of energy. “Something happens when there’s two or three of you on a swing,” says Christiansen. I asked a few strangers to join me and, properly ballasted, our swing finally took off: One Two Three Swing! When I tried to give one of them a go this morning, it quickly became obvious that I wouldn’t go very high without companions. In the case of this new installation, the swings are almost too heavy to be used solo. The group has never shied away from using direct, perhaps heavy-handed symbols (see for instance their films Flooded McDonald’s (2009) or Burning Car (2008) which show exactly what it says on the tin). SUPERFLEX hope that visitors here will go from apathetic viewers, staring at the pendulum ominously moving above their heads, to active participants, swinging together. The piece continues the collective’s exploration of public space as a lab for social experiments-an impulse that led them to create urban parks in Copenhagen ( Superkilen, 2011) and Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates ( The Bank, 2013 ).
SUPERFLEX have pushed the logic to its extreme, blurring the distinction between the museum’s indoor and outdoor spaces, and nodding towards the site’s history as a generator of energy. When the Bankside Power Station was converted starting in 1996, the fledgling Tate Modern designated its former heart, the Turbine Hall, as a “street,” freely open to the public.
One Two Three Swing! features a giant pendulum swinging over a carpet printed with the color scheme of British banknotes, as well as over 30 three-seater swingsets attached to a labyrinthine orange pole that snakes throughout the space. In 2011’s Power Toilets, they revamped a bathroom at a downtown Manhattan restaurant to exactly resemble the executive facilities at JPMorgan Chase bank.įor the Turbine Hall, they’ve harnessed the radical potential of play in a monumental installation that takes over the cavernous atrium and spills out onto the courtyard outside the museum’s recently opened extension, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The group took on multinational coroporations’ guaraná monopoly in Brazil with the launch of a locally run guaraná drink cooperative ( Guaraná Power, 2003), and campaigned for the inclusion of Palestine in the Eurovision singing contest (in which an Israeli team has competed since 1973, ( Palestinian Eurovision, 2008). Their first major project involved designing a bubble which allowed the production of enough gas to sustain a rural family “living in the global south” ( Supergas, 1996). SUPERFLEX have always used an art context in order to engage with the wider world.
One Two Three Swing!, their contribution to the Tate Modern’s series of Turbine Hall commissions, is no exception. But over the last 24 years, the Danish trio (which also includes Jakob Fenger and Rasmus Nielsen) has addressed an array of socio-political issues in truly innovative ways. In almost anyone else’s mouth, such a claim would ring hollow. Bjørnstjerne Christiansen of the art collective SUPERFLEX talks a lot about “challenging power structures”-and now he’s planning to take down the system with a super bright orange playground.