When I lived in London, I loved to take walks along South Bank and to hang out at the Tate Museum, so I'm always interested to see what exhibitions are commissioned and installed in the Turbine Hall of the Museum. When the latest exhibit was unveiled on Monday, I was really excited, more so than for the last few installations. The Unilever Series, Sunflower Seeds, by Ai Weiwei consists of 100 million individually handmade porcelain replicas of seeds which have been spread across the floor of the Turbine Hall. The public was then invited to walk and interact with the installation and for this reason the idea captured my imagination, I suppose by appealing to my inner child. I wished I could have been there to experience it first-hand and I definitely would have pocketed one of the seeds to keep as a souvenir.
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| Images: Lennart Preiss/AP, Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images, David Levene for the Guardian |
Unfortunately as I write today, a statement has been issued by the Museum indicating that the exhibit will be closed to the public until further notice due to the fact that people walking on the ceramic seeds has caused unhealthy amounts of ceramic dust to be released into the air. Going forward, the artwork may only be viewed from a bridge overlooking the Turbine Hall and the public will not be able to interact with it. To me this represents the death of the exhibit because a major part of the attraction was the fact that you could touch, lie down and roll around in the sunflower seeds. Restricting the public's ability to do so I feel takes away a fundamental part of what was the main attraction of the piece and the exhibit has therefore lost much of its impact.
A real shame.
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