The director of Tate, Nicholas Serota, and the new director of Tate Modern, Frances Morris, who succeeded Chris Dercon just over a week ago, revealed details today, 14 April, of the art and special performances visitors will encounter when the “new Tate Modern” opens on 17 June. “All the doors will be open,” Serota said, referring to those in the former power station, now renamed Boiler House, and the entrances in the £260m, brick-clad, nine-floor extension designed by Herzog & de Meuron, called Switch House.
Serota said that the new Tate Modern might attract more visitors, perhaps up to 5.5 million a year, but the goal was to improve visitors’ experience of art and show more of the collection. He also confirmed that Tate still needed to raise £30m but was confident that donors would come forward as the scaffolding around the extension comes down.
Visitors will arrive on 17 June to find Ai Weiwei’s recently acquired Tree (2015)—one of many works added to the collection since 2000 when Tate Modern opened—on the bridge over the central Turbine Hall. Three quarters of the works selected for new displays in the galleries in the Boiler House and Switch House have been acquired over the past 15 years.
The displays across the galleries will be more international and include more works by women. Artists from 57 countries will be represented to expand the presentations of Modern and contemporary art. Morris said that “familiar histories will be refocused,” by adding the “pre-history of global art” as well as showing a "fully global" view of contemporary art. She gave as an example the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’s Babel (2001), a tower of 800 transistor radios creating a “global chatterbox”.
Familiar works from the collection will be on display in new ways in the Boiler House galleries, including Picasso’s Weeping Women (1937), which will be placed in the context of civil wars alongside depictions of other conflicts. Matisse's The Snail (1953) will be among the works hung in a space designed to introduce first-time visitors to the gallery. But the walls of Tate Modern’s Rothko room will be the same grey, Morris said. A new app supported by Bloomberg will help visitors find their way around the displays and bigger building.
Serota and Morris said they will be glad to get the Tanks back, the performance and installation spaces beneath the new extension, which opened briefly in 2012. In the former oil storage tanks, barriers will be removed from three large works originally meant to be walked around, including a sculpture by Robert Morris.
Live art and performances will take place in the Tanks and across the galleries, supported by BMW, while Uniqlo is supporting the extended hours until 10pm during the opening weekend. A highlight will be the British artist Peter Liversidge's specially commissioned choral work. More than 500 singers will perform the piece on the opening Saturday.
The first members of the public to see inside the new Tate Modern will be around 3,000 school children from across the UK. The artist and champion of arts education in schools, Bob and Roberta Smith, will be on hand to welcome them.
Morris revealed that the artists Tracey Emin and Phyllida Barlow will be among the few to get a preview of the new installation. They are due to visit tomorrow to help install works by Louise Bourgeois in a special display in a gallery devoted to the Artist Rooms collection. When Tate Modern opened in 2000, Bourgeois created three steel towers, the first commission for the Turbine Hall.
