Tate Modern, in partnership with UNIQLO, proudly lifts the curtain on its latest UNIQLO Tate Play installation: The Flooded Garden. This remarkable exhibition, slated for 20th July to 26th August 2024, offers an engaging intersection of art, community involvement, and sound performance.
Credited to the distinguished artist Oscar Murillo, this installation encourages visitors to contribute to a colossal, multi-layered painting spread across the Turbine Hall. The artwork draws from Murillo’s Surge series and Claude Monet’s iconic Water Lilies painting.
The expansive canvas installation, adorned with hundreds of messages and drawings by international visitors, invites audiences to add their wave-like brushstrokes. These gestures blend together, forming ‘The Flooded Garden’, a continually evolving work of art painted in shades of deep blues, brilliant yellows and vibrant pinks.
Complementing this immersive experience, the Turbine Hall will resonate with traditional Colombian Pacific music. Murillo has enlisted Mar, Rio y Cordillera, a Colombian musical group, to conduct weekly performances. The musical interludes, captained by The Flooded Garden, will extend their rhythms to green spaces across London through spontaneous ‘flooding’ performances throughout August.
For further inspiration, a survey display of Murillo’s previous Surge series paintings is available in Tate Modern’s South Tank. The series, echoing Monet’s Water Lilies, explores the concept of ‘social cataracts’, drawing a parallel between physical loss of sight and our social inability to genuinely understand each other.
Murillo’s site-specific installation, Mesmerizing Beauty 2024, enhances the experience. The installation features white plastic garden chairs holding framed works on paper, surrounded by Surge (social cataracts) 2019-2024 paintings. These paintings symbolise the connecting fluidity of water, resonating with the curved participatory structures in the Turbine Hall.
Since its launch in 2021, UNIQLO Tate Play has committed to providing participatory art commissions and activities for families with the principle that art and play are for everyone. Given its overwhelming success, enjoyed by more than 400,000 people, UNIQLO has extended its support for the programme for another five years, from 2024 to 2029. The Flooded Garden is the latest exciting chapter in this story of creativity, community and inclusivity.