Throughout the year, UNIQLO Tate Play organizes participatory art commissions and offers free activities to families visiting Tate Modern, encouraging people of all ages to play together and be creative. The program is always accessible to all, inspired by the belief that art and play are for everyone. Since its launch in 2021, it has commissioned large-scale projects from renowned artists including Rasheed Araeen, Yayoi Kusama and Ei Arakawa, enjoyed by over 400.000 people.
Based on this incredible success, UNIQLO has extended its support to the program for another 5 years, from 2024 to 2029
This year it is the artist Oscar Murillo invited 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 is inspired by Claude Monet's Water Lilies depicting his garden in Giverny, France, while building on Murillo's Surge series of works, which feature gestural strokes in oil paint that flow across the canvas like water. Visitors will enter a curved structure framed by towering canvas walls that have been populated with hundreds of hand-drawn messages and drawings from international visitors to Tate Modern. Audiences are invited to layer wavy brushstrokes onto the canvases, with their gestures coming together to create The Flooded Garden, painting in shades of deep blues, bright yellows and pinks. These ever-evolving collaborative paintings will then remain on display in the Turbine Hall for all to see.
The artist also called on artists to flood the 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 the traditional music of the Colombian Pacific. True to The Flooded Garden, these musicians, percussionists and performers will also be taking over green spaces across London with a series of impromptu 'flooded' shows throughout August.
A display of paintings from Tate Modern's South Tank of Murillo's Surge series from over the years provides inspiration for visitors
Influenced by Claude Monet's famous Water Lilies paintings, created while Monet was suffering from cataracts, Murillo draws similarities between this loss of sight and the way people can be "socially blind," impeding our ability to truly understand each other. 'other. Murillo calls this idea “social cataract,” explaining that “we find ourselves in this kind of blinded existence, the facade of beauty.” After first exhibiting Surge's works in 2019, Murillo continued to develop the series during the global pandemic while in his hometown in Colombia. Here he divides his time between study and work with his community, in what he defines as a period of "social collapse".
Murillo's site-specific installation Mesmerizing Beauty 2024 floods the center of the South Tank, with white plastic lawn 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 signs, reminiscent of political protest. Surrounded by a multi-panel installation of the artist's Surge (social cataracts) 2019-2024 paintings, suspended from the ceiling, the artist's layered blue gestures cycle through the space, symbolizing the connective fluidity of water and mirroring participatory structures curves in the Turbine Room. On August 1st the artist invites a group of performers to activate this installation. Using movement and speech, artists respond to drawings inscribed with words such as “strike,” “force,” “law,” “masses,” and “protest.”
Cover image: UNIQLO Tate Play: Oscar Murillo, The Flooded Garden, Tate Modern, 20 July – 26 August 2024 Photo by Tim Bowditch and Tom Parker, courtesy of the artist. Copyright Oscar Murillo.
