I took my children to see Anicka Yi’s enchanting In Love with the World exhibition at the Tate Modern this weekend. They were absolutely delighted with it and like everyone else there, spent a lot of time looking up at Yi’s peculiar and visually arresting critters, which she calls aerobes. We watched them for ages moving around the space, far longer that one might expect to spend with an artwork, which I heard today is typically five seconds. We also viewed them from several different vantage points, including the lower floor, the central bridge, the glassed-over viewing platforms on the gallery side of the building, and finally from the highest bridge that links the original half of the Tate with the newer Switch House. Some people even lay down to watch the aerobes’ hypnotic and beguiling performance. In fact, my photographs of people looking at the work might be more interesting as images than any I took of the aerobes. Pretty as they are, the fun is in spending time with them. Finally, I can’t help but compare my images, the artwork itself, of course, and not forgetting the title and big-name sponsorship, with another activity I photographed in the Turbine Hall earlier this year, when the same space was being used as a temporary NHS vaccination centre.
All images (c)SJField2021