The current Unilever Series commission is both sculpture and theatrical experience. Externally, it is a gigantic steel-fashioned cuboid that manages, despite its dimensions (about 3900 cubic metres), to be relatively unassuming at a distance; the steel panels of which it consists echo the walls of the Turbine Hall itself, and it emanates a subdued air of stoical, practical industrial functionality. It is far from clear, however, that this functionality is a benign one, for the work’s evocation of containers, together with the ramp that leads inside it, is reminiscent of the trucks that took away the victims of the Nazis to the concentration camps (Balka himself grew up in a town where seventy-five percent of the population had died in the camps).

Yet even these connotations are overshadowed when you are confronted with the theatrical dimension of the work. The inside walls are covered in a light-absorbing coating so that the visitor is faced with walking 30 metres forward into darkness, which, beyond the more primordial apprehensions that it triggers, is also a rare occurrence in modern life. Safety standards have ensured that public spaces are always adequately lit such that darkness, or at least the absence of lighting, has come to function as a sort of signifier of prohibited spaces, of places that are off limits or entry is at one’s own risk. The instinctual responses that surface vie with a keenly felt need to explore the full extent of the darkness within the work: to investigate it, to understand it – with results that differ widely between individuals. A brief stint of observation from inside, facing the entrance, reveals that few stride ahead unhesitantly; most clutch at their friends, inch ahead with disproportionate caution, crawl along the sides, or shrewdly find some means of illumination (almost always a mobile phone).

It is an experience that consists of both a communal and a personal aspect. On the one hand, one’s awareness of how others navigate the situation is key to one’s own choice of strategy; the confidence of others, or lack thereof, is infectious. Yet on the other hand, other subjects are reduced from identifiable faces to mere vague depersonalised shapes and silhouettes such that the distance between self and other seems to grow into an unbridgeable divide. Nevertheless, there does seem to be something that can be said in favour of a shared commonality. At least for those who did not look back, the moment of reaching the end, of then turning around to see the distance that has been walked in the darkness suddenly illuminated, of comprehending your own spatial positioning, and the clarity of the way back, triggers a feeling of pleasure that is likely to be universally shared – it is as though the darkness has been understood and intellectually recuperated.

Until Apr 5

FENG ZHU