Wednesday, August 22, 2012

South Bank to Tate Modern, London


We hopped off the bus on Waterloo Bridge and wound our way down to the riverfront and found not only skate boarders but Rainbow Park... coloured layers of curvy fabulousness that you could climb up, leap off or just sit on. Eventually we sauntered off and were lured down onto the shore by a sand sofa, only to realise that the tide was out and we could stroll off towards Tate Modern without being washed away. We found abandoned anchors and collected stones.


In Tate Modern we spotted the crowds of semi-choreographed folk wandering through the Turbine Hall. Having read that if stopped they'd talk to us, I spread out my arms and the girls joined in and a lovely Iranian man knelt down and told us a stroy of falling into his grandmother's pond when little and imagining mermaids and sea creatures beneath it as he sank. He didn't want to come back up but he was pulled out and still wonders if perhaps what he saw was real... We loved him and by virtue of that perhaps we love the artist, Tino Sehgal, too.

The Tanks that we'd come to see were dark and cavernous and full of interesting industrial concrete and girders but the art left us a little lost. In one totally dark space a motion-activated arrow followed us around, disconcertingly.