UNIQLO Tate Play: Oscar Murillo: The flooded garden 20 July - 26 August 2024

This week, Tate Modern unveils UNIQLO Tate Play: The flooded garden, part of Tate Modern’s free programme of art for all in partnership with UNIQLO. This year, artist Oscar Murillo invites visitors of all ages to make their mark on a vast, layered painting in the Turbine Hall, creating a collaborative work of epic proportions. The installation takes inspiration from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies depicting his garden in Giverny, France, while building on Murillo’s series of Surge works, which feature gestural strokes in oil paint flowing across the canvas like water.

Visitors will enter a curved structure framed by towering walls of canvas that have been populated with hundreds of hand-drawn messages and drawings by international visitors to Tate Modern. Audiences are invited to layer wave-like brushstrokes atop the canvases, with their gestures flowing together to create The flooded garden, painting in hues of deep blues, bright yellows and pinks. These continually evolving collaborative paintings will then remain on display in the Turbine Hall for all to see.

As part of this year’s commission the artist has also invited performers to flood Tate Modern with sound. Mar, Rio y Cordillera, a group of 12 musicians from the Valle del Cauca region of Colombia, will present weekly performances in the Turbine Hall celebrating traditional music from the Colombian Pacific. Anchored by The flooded garden, these musicians, percussionists, and performers will also takeover green spaces across London with a series of impromptu ‘flooding’ performances throughout August.

A survey display in Tate Modern’s South Tank of Murillo’s Surge series paintings from over the years provides inspiration for visitors. Influenced by Claude Monet’s celebrated Water Lilies paintings, created while Monet was experiencing cataracts, Murillo draws similarities between this loss of sight and the way people can be ‘socially blind’ – impeding our ability to truly understand one another. Murillo calls this idea ‘social cataracts’, explaining ‘we are in this kind of blinded existence, the façade of beauty’. Having first exhibited Surge works in 2019, Murillo continued to develop the series during the global pandemic while in his hometown in Colombia. Here he divided his time between the studio and working with his community, in what he describes as a time of “social collapse”.

Murillo’s site-specific Mesmerizing Beauty 2024 installation floods the centre of the South Tank, with white plastic garden chairs holding framed works on paper. Often incorporated into Murillo’s exhibitions and performances, these simple chairs evoke informal community gatherings. Murillo’s paintings are placed on wooden supports that resemble placards, reminiscent of political protest. Encircled by a multi-panelled installation of the artist’s Surge (social cataracts) 2019-2024 paintings, suspended from the ceiling, the artist’s layered blue gestures flow cyclically around the space, symbolic of the connecting fluidity of water, and mirroring the curved participatory structures in the Turbine Hall. On 1 August the artist invites a group of performers to activate this installation. Using movement and spoken word, performers respond to drawings inscribed with words such as ‘strike’, ‘force’, ‘law’, ‘masses’ and ‘protest’.

All year round, UNIQLO Tate Play stages participatory art commissions and offers free activities to families visiting Tate Modern, encouraging people of all ages to play together and get creative. The programme is always made available to all, inspired by the belief that art and play are for everyone. Since launching in 2021 it has commissioned large-scale projects by renowned artists including Rasheed Araeen, Yayoi Kusama and Ei Arakawa that have been enjoyed by more than 400,000 people. Building on this incredible success, UNIQLO have extended their support of the programme for a further 5 years, from 2024 to 2029.