Mire Lee Wins Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Commission

Tate Modern, London, today announced that it has awarded Korean-born artist Mire Lee the 2024 Turbine Hall commission. Lee, who divides her time between Seoul and Amsterdam, is known for her visceral kinetic sculptural installations that conjure mechanized organisms. Deploying materials such as oil, silicone, chains, clay, cement, and steel rods, Lee creates works that explore the intersection between human fantasy and technological reality. Her commission will open October 8 and remain on view through March 2025.

“Mire Lee is one of today’s most intriguing and original contemporary artists and we are delighted she will be creating her first work in the UK here at Tate Modern,” said Tate Modern director Karin Hindsbo in a statement. “Lee produces powerful sculptures, and we look forward to seeing how she transforms the iconic Turbine Hall with her subversive, multi-sensory forms.”

Lee originally planned to become a filmmaker but, preferring to work alone, shifted to art, earning her BA and MFA at Seoul National University. Among the venues in which she has shown recently are the 2022 Venice Biennale, her contribution Endless House: Holes and Drips garnering from the event’s curator, Cecilia Alemani, a comparison to “dragon guts”; and New York’s New Museum, where she presented her installation Black Sun last year. “I like to incorporate motorized elements because they have a crude appearance and act beyond my control; when I use machinery to process malleable materials like clay or silicone, it distorts those media into strange forms that I couldn’t have anticipated,” Lee told Artforum’s Cassie Packard in 2023. “People often tether my animatronic sculptures to conversations about technology, but what’s happening in my work is in fact fairly analog and runs counter to the slick aesthetic of new technologies and new media. What intrigues me is the gap between human fantasies of technology in an ideally rendered world, and real life, which is something that you can touch and smell, full of sagging subjects that have been deformed by their passage through time.”

The Tate Turbine Hall commission was established in 2000 and has since 2015 been mounted collaboratively with Hyundai Motor. Among the artists awarded the prestigious commission to date are Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Tania Bruguera, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Olafur Eliasson, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker, Cecilia Vicuña, and Anicka Yi. The 2023 commission, El Anatsui’s Behind the Red Moon, is on view through April 14.