Last night I went to check out Tate Modern's 10th anniversary festival with a few friends. For the duration of the weekend Tate have invited 70 non for profit art organisations and collectives from around the world to set up shop in the famed Turbine Hall, creating a kind of mass market of stalls, displays and artwork for the public to navigate themselves through. Each participating organisation has been given a small square in which they are free to show what they like, and the displays range from artist's work to manifestos and propaganda to interactive installations. On top of this a programme of talks and film screenings has been put together, running throughout the weekend.
The main idea was to create an environment with no walls, allowing all these organisations to interact and engage with each other in a way that could not be possible anywhere else. Although it was rather manic and hard to really take in individual elements (it took a while to work out where one began and another ended at first) it is certainly an admirable idea for Tate to come up with, and it was really nice to see these tiny collectives and art spaces given a platform to reach out to such a wide audience. Whether or not it was entirely successful is another thing, but it was certainly an experience to wander through it all and see what is on show, and with art spaces from as far afield as Beijing, Morocco and New York it is certainly a great way to get a glimpse of what's happening on an international scale.
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