Tricks with Triffids at Tate

It’s all gone a bit Day of the Triffids in the Turbine Hall. Giant sculptures on legs stalk across the floor, towering over the punters who walk between a grid of metal bunk beds.
A French fortysomething artist, Gonzalez-Forster is almost unknown in this country but she’s highly regarded in European museum circles for her interactive room-like environments, redolent of film sets.

In the Nineties she was part of a group of artists labelled "relational" for the role that visitors played in the works of art (though she’d probably kick me where it hurts if I used that term to her face). Carsten Holler, who built the slides for the Turbine Hall in 2006, is a fellow traveller.

Forster’s Turbine Triffids are a set of scaled-up classic modern works of art. A huge Alexander Calder red welded steel sculpture is almost intertwined with a Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture. There’s a blown‑up Henry Moore sheep at one end but the prize exhibit is a giant cat skeleton in the style of a Tyrannosaurus Rex by the world’s funniest artist, Maurizio Cattelan.
These sculptures have been slotted by Forster into a cinematic narrative. As the text on the wall tells us, it’s 2058. It’s been raining hard and works of art have suddenly started growing. Now humans and artworks alike have taken shelter — hence the bunk beds.

On top of this, Forster has added a layer of science fiction exhibition. There’ s a good sci-fi book on each bed (Forster proves that some artists are well read by including not only a Ballard and a Bradbury but also the Russian communist era classic We, which inspired 1984. A bright video screen plays movies clips in the same genre. This may not add up to a unified work of art but it’s an extremely imaginative exercise in curating, with its combination of artworks, books and film, and it does what Turbine Hall installations are meant to do: it’s witty, it’s spectacular and it will draw children and adults into art and its ideas — no background knowledge required.

Still, it may not quite induce the same level of participation as Olafur Eliasson’s seminal Weather Project in the Turbine (2004), in which visitors stretched out in front of an orange orb of light as if they were watching a Martian sunset. There’s something missing from Forster’s minimalist blue and yellow bunk beds — comfy mattresses.

Until 13 April 2009. Free.

TH.2058
Turbine Hall