Tate Modern, London; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
The Turbine Hall has been turned into a mesmerising giant aquarium by Anicka Yi. And the steak knives are out in Sutapa Biswas’s wise, poetic response to colonial history
Translucent sea creatures drift through the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, moving through that great gulf like elegant swimmers. Some have tentacles, gilded and graceful. Others have antennae that flutter like miniature fins. Rising and falling, pulsing and swaying, these giant organisms pass among the sunbeams in magical shoals – turning all that empty space into one colossal aquarium.
These “aerobes”, as she calls them, are the work of the Korean American conceptual artist Anicka Yi (born 1971), aided by sundry AI experts, programmers and neurobiologists. It is immediately obvious that science must be somehow involved. For these shining entities – some like radiant jellyfish, others more like glowing puffer fish – never descend low enough for us to reach. And nor do they ever collide.
