Opening later this week, the latest instalment of Tate Modern’s partnership with Uniqlo—perhaps most famous right now for that bag– sees joint Turner prize winner Oscar Murillo take over Turbine Hall. Part of the museum’s Tate Play programme, The flooded garden invites visitors to borrow inspiration from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and add their own flowing brushstrokes to immense walls of canvas. Both thoughtful reflections and profanities are, apparently, to be expected.
The work explores the idea of “social cataracts”—a phrase coined by Murillo himself. In its literal sense, the term references Monet’s impaired vision and “the idea of blindness and pain. Like you’re being attacked from within, like your own biology is letting you down,” Murillo tells The Art Newspaper.
Figuratively, it reflects on a society increasingly lacking in empathy, in which the failure of the collective obscures the behaviour of the individual.
As its name suggests, Murillo hopes The flooded garden will burst the banks of the Tate, and that it will do so with the collective energy of a “concert or a football stadium”. A stirring and emotive image—if perhaps a little overwhelming for recovering England fans.
- The flooded garden, Tate Modern, 20 July-26 August
