How do you celebrate a big birthday? If your answer is ‘alone with a bottle of wine and a Deliveroo order big enough to feed the 5,000’ then you’re definitely not the Tate Modern. If, however, your answer is ‘with an immersive mirror room installation from a celebrated Japanese artist’, then you’re getting warm.
Tate Modern turns 20 this year, and rather than being given the keys to a second-hand Ford Fiesta her parents have decided to engage the services of Yayoi Kusama to come and fix up a year-long exhibition that’s going to be the talk of town when it opens in May. The Bankside museum has partnered with Kusama to create two mirror rooms, one – Infinity Mirrored Room — Filled with the Brilliance of Life, is one of the largest produced by the nonagenarian, is returning to Tate Modern after it previously appeared there in 2012.
The other, cheerfully titled Chandelier of Grief, will “create the illusion of a boundless universe of rotating crystal chandeliers” and will give Londoners a rare chance to enjoy works from this revered artist.
Her works will be shown alongside “photos and footage of early performance works and studio happenings” to celebrate the coming-of-age of the gallery. In its short life so far, the gallery has fought and succeeded to remain at the forefront of the art world, with highlights included Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, which attracted over 2m visitors in 2004, and Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds.
Infinity Rooms opens on Monday 11th May and will stick around for a whole year. Enjoy the mirrors, lights and art… and grief.
