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Kenneth Person

@kennethperson0

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(24 and final) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

Goavve seen from the Level 4 bridge.

The world under construction was however one of husbandry and sustainability, in contrast to the Turbine Hall as a repository of grand industrial and late imperial history. While using the space imaginatively and positively, Sara was invoking an economic and spiritual order starkly different to the callous financialism and dismal luxury consumption of which London is a hub — and into which the art world sometimes is drawn.

Jones’s plane crash of a review is the sort of thing that happens when a critic greets a work with utterly irrelevant assumptions and insists they be met. The critic is flying blind. The instruments such as they are give misleading read-outs. He has found an MO for getting things exactly wrong.

Yet the distancing, infantilising tone — “did no one think to ask her …” — suggests an aggressively patronising attitude possibly of the political moment. In a toe-curling misreading which tries to turn the tables, Jones wants to “rationalise” the piece by portraying its modesty as hostile to the Turbine Hall and the city in which it stands. The far right has a long history of projecting its own woes and vices onto its opponents. I do not know where on the political spectrum Jones sits. His criticism tends to have a populist edge. (For all I know, he may be a generous contributor to left causes. Yet L.S. Lowry is too subtle for him.) His review of Sara’s installation is the clearest example I have seen yet of an art critic projecting his own hostility onto the work. Just the same sneering, tantrum-like review might have been written to applause from Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate @guardian by @kennethperson0

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4 months ago

(23) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

Goavve seen from the Level 4 bridge.

Unlike installations I have seen in the Turbine Hall in the past, Sara’s subtle, intense refinement of a small number of components — the sticks of the stockade and their varied treatments, the reindeer skulls, the light rods, the pelts — was world-building, not effect-seeking. Necessarily, the world-building drew in the context of the Turbine Hall and, to my mind, the birch grove on the South Bank. It was an unusually evocative and gentle use of the hall, without bombast, with no domineering strut. The play of luminosities and reflections, the articulation of the piece against the different levels — the Level 0 floor with its reflective surfaces, the ramp, the Level 1 bridge, the Level 4 bridge, the west window, locked the world-building tightly to the context. The vertical reach of the Goavvee pelts in front of the high west window was monumental in scale, yet the column was part of the space appropriately enough to have always been there and to have been there to stay.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate @guardian by @kennethperson0

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4 months ago

(22) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

Geabbil seen from the Level 4 bridge.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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4 months ago

(21) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

Geabbil seen from the Level 4 bridge.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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5 months ago

(20) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

Geabbil seen from the Level 4 bridge. (The balustrade of the Level 1 bridge is in the foreground.)

A striking aspect of the installation, for the most part overlooked in the reception, was the range of its luminosities. The light-bearing sticks of the stockade, the light rods running through the pelts, their positioning in front of the vertical west window, the dark Geabbil reflections in the internal windows of the north wall, the reflections in the floor evoke various roles taken on by light across the year in the Sámi homeland.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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5 months ago

(19) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

The grove of birches planted between the Natalie Bell building and the Thames as part of the Tate Modern development is (to my eye) relevant as visual context for the Geabbil stockade.

The grove, here seen from a Level 3 window, may mark (though that of course is not its purpose) a location on the South Bank where a Sámi family went on display in the nineteenth century, serving reindeer meat to Britishers paying to ogle them. The same sort of abusively exoticizing anticipation appears to underpin many of the negative critical reactions to Sara's installation. Indeed, whether aware of the allusion or not, Jonathan Jones in @guardian dismally speculates that butchering reindeer in the Turbine Hall and serving the meat might save the piece from what he misconstrues as its irrelevance. (Perhaps he should have eaten before going to the preview.)

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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(18) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

Thinking about living on earth in terms of new and old forms of husbandry, a challenging, serious, hopeful approach to the future, one which many speaking to the present political moment would like to reject out of hand.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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5 months ago

(17) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

An installation challenging us to think about an altered relationship between humans and (the rest of) nature.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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5 months ago

(16) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

At Level 0, a detail of the variously textured and finely layered sticks of the Geabbil stockade. Taking into full account the necessary differences in the work itself, its reception would perhaps have been very different if it had been presented as, say, by a Japanese artist, in other words, as coming out of a place with a well recognised tradition of conceptualist minimalism. The installation, still more than El Anatsui’’s in 2023 - 2024, is also a reminder that most Turbine Hall installations have had a strong touch of bombast about them, while few have been subtle. Eliasson’s marvellous sun managed to combine the two, but many have been massive one-liners. Sara is subtle and the subtleties help carry the piece.

A disappointed expectation of bombast seems to have helped reviewers go astray. Fixed wrongheaded anticipation makes appropriation of art difficult, but the reviewers appear also to have wanted to go astray and to speak to a moment of graceless, self-obsessed majoritarian identity politics hostile to minority cultures and concerns for climate and political and economic change.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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5 months ago

(15) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

The stockaded sticks of Geabbil reflected in the dark internal windows in the south wall on Level 0.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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5 months ago

(14) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

The stretched pelts of Goavve (here, cloud-like) reflected in the glass wall to the Tanks and Blavatnik Building, again from ground level (Level 0).

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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5 months ago

(13) Máret Ánne Sara, Goavve-Geabbil, mixed media installation, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2025 - 2026.

A detail of one of the stacked, suspended pelts of Goavve, taken from the ramped floor of the Turbine Hall.

#maretannesara #tatemodern #turbinehall
@maretannesara @tate by @kennethperson0

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