Immersive Experience – Heather Phillipson Fills Tate’s Duveen Galleries with Sound, Colour and Motion

The London artist, Heather Phillipson has transformed Tate Britain Duveen Galleries into an immersive audio-visual spectacle. The galleries, consisting of three large separate rooms, have been transformed into a world from another dimension. Each room are filled with sound, colour, and motion in order to create a unique immersive experience and teleport visitors to the world of strangeness and generate ‘ecstatic experience’.

 

Heather Phillipson

Heather Phillipson's Sculpture at Trafalgar Square 2020

Heather Phillipson’s sculpture at Trafalgar Square: The End

Photo: Urban Adventurer

 

If your way led through Trafalgar Square last year, you must have stumbled upon the sculpture of Heather Phillipson, called, The End; a monumental whipped cream with a cherry on top and a drone with spinning propeller glued into the cream while a giant fly was feasting on the sweet treat.

 

Rupture No.1: Blowtorching the Bitten Peach

Rupture No.1 Blowtorching the Bitten Peach - Tate Britain

Photo: Urban Adventurer

 

The exhibition conjures unexpected combinations to create a complex bizarre universe where everything is possible. Here everything is repurposed, remixed, and redeployed. A giant papier-mâché sculpture, mountains of salt, rotating anchors, a collapsed silo, glitchy animal eye close-ups and more.

It is a complex absurd system that creates the horrifying feeling of it ‘may be on the verge of collapse’. – Phillipson describes her work.

The artist describes her work as a sequence of ‘charged ecosystems, maladaptive seasons and unearthed lifeforms’.

Take a mini virtual tour here.

Note that this is an immersive installation which includes flashing lights and sudden loud noises!

 

The Red Room

Heather Phillipson - Tate Britain

Photo: Urban Adventurer

 

Your experience starts in a red-lit room, where you are immediately captured by wild animal eyes blinking on giant screens from the top of salt mountains. While wandering around, you hear the screams of those animals from speakers hanging from the ceiling on ropes.

 

The Purple Room

Immersive Exhibition in Tate Britain - Heather Phillipson

Photo: Urban Adventurer

 

On continuing your peculiar journey towards the next room, you have to pass beneath a 15m high papier-mâché sculpture that seems like a goddess.

In the purple room the temperature seems to drop.

Four-horned metal fuel barrels, like bizarre living creatures of another dimension, crowd around a lake, where petrol pump trunks submerged into a thick sticky liquid while glugging sounds are echoing around the room.

As we go from one room to another, the temperature feels colder, and the sounds and other effects get louder and harsher.

 

The Blue Room

Heather Phillipson - Rupture No.1 Blowtorching the Bitten Peach

Photo: Urban Adventurer

 

The final room is the climax of this odd world. Here, the cold, blue-lit room is being rampaged over by (the sound of) roaring wind. Heavy storm clouds are projected onto the surrounding walls. This a nuclear wasteland.

A silo stands on the other side of the room, collapsed.  Wind turbines are roaring each side of the building, but instead of rotors, two anchors are propelling.

At the back, a peach-like Sun rising over the sea.

 

Phillipson’s artworks perfectly and effortlessly fill the vast space of Duveens Galleries. The layers of video, music, sculpture, installation, poetry, and digital media are perfectly glued together, creating a bizarre yet coherent thought-provoking universe for us to enjoy.

 

More Info About the Exhibition

The exhibition is open until 23 January 2022.

This exhibition is included in all one-way routes through Tate Britain.

Book your free, timed ticket here.

Address:

TATE BRITAIN

Duveen Galleries

Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG

 

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