A vast engine spins, spilling noxious, viscous liquid onto the floor of the Turbine Hall. Mire Lee’s machine is draped in tentacles which ooze and flop around, drenching the cavernous space.
The Korean artist’s machine isn’t useless, it produces, it makes products. Hung from the ceiling of the Turbine Hall, stretched taut on metal frames, are countless ‘skins’; ripped, clay-coloured fabrics which look like leather made from some unknown creature…maybe even made from humans.
And that’s the point. By dragging the Turbine Hall’s industrial past back into the present, reanimating the corpse of Britain’s power, she’s talking about the human cost of industry, the shocking violence of manufacturing, the exploitative drive of capitalism. This is where it ends up: a broken, rusting machine spewing out vile, useless products at shocking human cost.
Over the course of the exhibition, more skins will be produced and hung grimly from the ceiling. Does it look a bit like a steampunk laundrette, or the world’s least appetising butcher shop? Totally, but it’s still the best Turbine Hall installation for years. The machine itself looks like a flayed body, its flesh suspended from the rafters, its blood and plasma splashing on the concrete, its turnine a faltering, exposed heart; these are the remains of industry, the decrepit, shattered limbs of a manufacturing past that has been left to rot. It’s like all of modern society being forced to look in the mirror, and finding only a corpse staring back.
