The Unilever Series: an annual art commission sponsored by Unilever
Bruce Nauman’s audio installation was the fifth in The Unilever Series of commissions for Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall. Continuing Nauman’s fascination with the inherent ambiguity of language, this piece consists of sections from 22 audio recordings taken from works produced throughout almost 40 years of his extraordinary career. Speakers playing the individual recordings were arranged at intervals along the Turbine Hall, so that visitors encountered a series of disembodied voices, each enunciating simple texts or single words in an explosive or insistent way that tested language to its very limits. Through this project, the artist wanted to expose the way in which words shape our perceptions of the world, making us realise that we can see – and see through – language.
The exhibition was curated by Emma Dexter, assisted by Ben Borthwick.
Sponsored by Swiss Re
Supported by Pro Helvetia, Arts Council of Switzerland
A collaboration with Schaulager, Basel.
This exhibition explored the work of world-renowned architects Herzog & de Meuron through the display of by-products or ‘waste’ produced during the course of their work. Over 1,000 objects, including over 250 architectural models as well as film footage and photographs of finished projects, told the fascinating story of how ideas form and take shape. From Herzog & de Meuron’s early local projects to large-scale international commissions like Tate Modern and Bayern Munich’s football stadium, this exhibition in the Turbine Hall offered the opportunity to view their oeuvre within an architectural space considered to be one of their greatest achievements.
The exhibition was curated for Tate Modern by Sheena Wagstaff, assisted by Stephen Mellor.
The Unilever Series: an annual art commission sponsored by Unilever.
Rachel Whiteread’s monumental work, EMBANKMENT, was the sixth project in the Unilever Series of commissions for the Turbine Hall. In the vast and impressive space, the artist created a labyrinth-like structure comprised of 14,000 plastic casts of the insides of just ten different cardboard boxes of varying shapes and sizes. The artist associated these boxes with the storage of intimate personal items, as a signifier of intimate memories. It was the latest in a series of large-scale commissions undertaken by Whiteread, but instead of attempting to simply fill the space Whiteread articulated the Turbine Hall as a container of collective memory, parcelling the volume of interior space into units that related to human scale, as well as relating her forms to the use of industrial materials in minimalist sculpture. The piece was further inspired by Whiteread's recent visit to the Arctic, its translucent whiteness also resembling an organic landscape in parts.
The exhibition was curated by Catherine Wood.
