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Enormous sculptures soar above you ... TH.2058 at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Photograph: David Levene
Enormous sculptures soar above you ... TH.2058 at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Photograph: David Levene

Sci-fi and shivers: TH.2058 at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall

This article is more than 15 years old

To walk into Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's new installation at Tate Modern is like walking into a sci-fi movie - a deeply disturbing, rather dark experience in which you the viewer project your own narrative and your own anxieties on to the piece. And, I suspect, with TH.2058 (as it is called), Tate has another Turbine Hall hit on its hands. Not only does it have at its heart the kind of "interactivity" that is so popular among visitors to Tate Modern, but also, with its apocalyptic vision, it seems deeply in tune with the times.

At the bottom of the ramp your path is blocked by heavy red and green plastic curtains and the insistent sound of rain. You are about to be transported 50 years into the future, you are told. Push the plastic barriers aside and you are in some kind of bunk-bed-filled disaster shelter - somewhere between Henry Moore's drawings of communal air-raid shelters in the blitz and the nightmarish dormitories of Soylent Green or Blindness, or of certain scenes in Battlestar Galactica.

On the bunks sit books - things like Fahrenheit 451 and The War of the Worlds - which distance you from the disaster-bunker fiction, but might also give you the chance for a peaceful 45 minutes on your back doing some background reading. Most grippingly, enormous sculptures soar above you. They look oddly familiar - isn't that Louise Bourgeois's Maman, the huge steel spider that's in the Tate's collection? Only ... it's much bigger than you remember it, and when you walk up to it and feel its cold surface, you suddenly realise you are feeling warm painted polystyrene. There's a vast Alexander Calder here too - his soaring red Flamingo - again bigger than real life. And an oversize Bruce Nauman, and a giant Henry Moore. It is as if they have grown (the insistent rain has fed these strange animals, perhaps, or we have diminished). It seems no coincidence that some of the sculptors here have been responsible for previous Turbine Hall installations. On a giant screen at the front of all this is a montage of sci-fi movies: clips from Solaris, Repulsion, Zabriskie Point and more. The Last Film, it's called. As if when the world ends we'll be watching it going down in fiction.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Turbine Hall at Tate Modern: 'London under fictional attack'

  • Tate Modern unveils the new Turbine Hall installation

  • Fanciful premonition meets art gags

  • Catastrophe at the Tate: new installation sees future world as a disaster shelter

  • What to say about … Tate Modern's new Turbine Hall installation

  • The Guardian UK Culture Podcast
    Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: Private view with Adrian Searle

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