Review: Global Cities

Exhibition: Global Cities
Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
20 June – 27 August

It comes as a welcome surprise that a show as profoundly vacuous as Global Cities should expose its superficiality in various and complex ways.

Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is undoubtedly a difficult space to fill sensibly with anything other than a giant turbine. Putting a one-storey scaffolding structure at one far end, however, shows a remarkable lack of ambition. In what follows I’ll ignore the ‘official’ art work on display, which is at times entertaining, pleasing or intriguing, but in the context of this show has the character of an afterthought, remembered dutifully and without enthusiasm.

Global Cities is a revamped (or rehashed) exhibition that had previously been on show at Venice’s 10th International Architecture Exhibition. The ostensible subject are ten ‘global cities’: the architecture of which they consist and the forms of life that they support. On the lower level exhibits are divided according to five themes (size, speed, form, density, diversity), much as King Lear might be analysed in terms of family, power, madness, eye-gouging etc. The exhibits as such are photographs and videos shown on makeshift walls and cubicles, but above all the chunks of text, statistics and graphs that are liberally stuck on any available surface. The star of the show ought by all rights be the statistician. On the upper level is a thin corridor, from which five or so larger platforms jut out. There are a number of objects on display there, but very few statistics, which is disappointing.