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It’s been 25 years since the Tate Modern opened in London, the Bankside Power Station re-imaged as one of the largest contemporary art museums in the world.
Tate Modern, and its cavernous Turbine Hall, has played host to art – a lot of it interactive – on a grand scale. When it opened in 2000, the curators commissioned and installed Maman, a 33-foot-high bronze and stainless steel spider with marble eggs, created by the artist Louise Bourgeois.
Maman returned in 2007, where she stood outside the Tate Modern as part of a major retrospective of the artist’s work. I visited as a teenager and it changed the course of my life, setting me on a path to studying History of Art and becoming an arts and culture journalist.
Now the giant sculpture is back for a third time, inside the Turbine Hall once more. “She feels like a protector of the ground that's been gained in terms of women's history of art,” says Catherine Wood, Director of Curatorial & Chief Curator at Tate Modern. “Having her back there, her presence, it's got this kind of ancestral power now. We should show her every 25 years.”
Visitors to the Tate Modern’s 25th Birthday Weekender, which kicked off today, will be able to admire Maman in all her splendour. There’s also a host of workshops and activities, including an activation of Roman Ondak’s Measuring the Universe, where visitors can measure their height to create a collaborative work of art.
Looking back over 25 years of Tate Modern, Wood takes us through some of the museum’s biggest moments:
Century City, 2001
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“In 2001, Tate Modern's opening exhibition Century City was setting out our stall for global art history, when the collection at the time was really North American and European and British.
“Century City told the story of modern contemporary art through nine cities that included Mumbai, Lagos, Rio, and Tokyo. It was a projection of how we wanted to expand the canon of art history. The collection now reflects the scope of that exhibition really well.”
Olafur Eliasson, Weather Project, 2003
“That giant sun was an absolutely standout moment. Not only because it was such a spectacular work that people loved, but also it's the first time that I think people understood the turbine hall as a public square.
“They came in and lay on the floor, and you could see yourself reflected in the mirror. People also came and did spontaneous yoga classes or joined in a circle, seeing themselves reflected in the ceiling.
“They were staging protests as well. There was the famous Bush Go Home when George Bush visited the UK and people made themselves into letters. Olafur was one of the first artists who really took on that giant space and made a work that wasn't just about filling it, it was about opening up the space for audiences.”
UBS Openings: The Long Weekend, 2006 – 2009
“One of the things I was really excited about in my time working at Tate was the long weekend festival that we started every May bank holiday weekend between 2006 to 2009. We commissioned major things. We did an overnight screening of Andy Warhol's sleep in the turbine hall where people could sleep over.
“An amazing moment was when the New York-based Trisha Brown Dance Company performed a piece from the 1970s called Man Walking Down the Side of the Building. It was literally what it says – a piece of abseiling down the front of Tate Modern as a dance piece, which drew a huge crowd.
“In 2008 we activated an archive of Fluxus instructions from the 60s and 70s, all these ideas for crazy things that artists had come up with. Often museums show them in vitrines as archived material, but we decided to reactivate the Flux-Olympiad, which involved all these weird Harry Potter-esque games that artists had come up with.
“Alison Knowles did Make A Salad, where she tossed a huge salad off the bridge into a tarpaulin and mixed it with a rake and everybody could have some. Michelangelo Pistoletto made this huge newspaper ball that was meant to be rolled through the streets collectively around Southwark in 2009.”
Ai Weiwei Sunflowers, 2010
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“Obviously the Ai Weiwei sunflower seeds is one of the really famous exhibits. He'd made all these tiny ceramic sunflower seeds to represent the makers in China making these tiny intricate objects en masse.
“But unfortunately, after people walked on it and gathered some handfuls, it created these clouds of dust that we hadn't anticipated, so no one could walk on it anymore, which was sad.
“I still meet people all the time that have a handful of those seeds. People came and took them as a souvenir, which wasn't actually the plan, but as with lots of things, that's what happened.”
Musee de la dance, 2015
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“Another of my favourites was in 2015 when the French choreographer Boris Sharmet transformed the whole of Tate Modern into the Musee de la dance – the dancing museum. Every gallery had pop-up dance performances happening inside, a history of dance from ballet to folk dance to contemporary German dance, a choreographer from Senegal who runs a school called School in the Sands.
“Then in the middle, we had the biggest disco ball we've ever had, and staged dance classes and performances, and a nightclub event.”
Tate Tanks open, 2016
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“Although the tanks had been opened earlier for selected events – we'd done a festival in 2012 – they properly opened in 2016 with a massive rehang of the collection. It was the first point where we could really show off our international collection from 300 artists coming from over 50 countries around the world.
“Our director at the time, Francis Morris, said half the solo displays had to be dedicated to women artists. Now that seems completely normal, but at the time, that was a shift, because until then, it'd been very male dominated. We had been collecting a lot more women artists and we just had to get them all on show.
“There's so many women artists that we'd shown in the history of earlier Tate Modern, Frida Kahlo and Yayoi Kusama, who are now absolute superstars, but they weren't at the time when they were first shown. Then when we brought Kusama’s Infinity Mirror rooms in 2023 we had our most visited exhibition of all time.”
Uniqlo Tate Play, 2021
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“Uniqlo Tate Play was something that we're really proud of. We launched as we were coming out of the pandemic lockdown period. It was the curatorial department really thinking about how can we use the turbine hall in ways that invite people in to co-create and make art together, not just look at it.
“Ei Arakawa came up with riffing off this famous Gutai group artwork called Please Draw Freely. They'd done it on a blank canvas they put up in the forest, but Arakawa turned the entire floor of the turbine hall into a drawing board and everybody could draw on there, which was really amazing after everybody had been locked up in their houses for so long in the pandemic moment.
“We've continued that year on year with Rasheed Araeen, Oscar Murillo, and coming up is Monster Chetwynd this July – just getting people involved in getting messy and turning the turbine Hall into a studio.”
Tate Modern’s 25th Birthday Weekender, 9 – 12 May, tate.org.uk
