Be warned: a visit to the Tate’s new exhibition could all end in tears

Menthol-based vapour used in piece depicting migrant crisis will ‘force people to cry’

AN ART gallery should always evoke some kind of emotion, but the Tate Modern’s newest installation is promising to literally reduce visitors to tears.

Today, it unveils the latest installation to feature in its huge Turbine Hall – a piece about the migration crisis that uses a menthol-based tear-inducing compound to get visitors welling up.

Curated by Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist, the floor of the hall is covered in a shiny, heat sensitive, black material.

Beneath it, at the far end of the hall, there is a hidden portrait of a young Syrian who fled his country in 2011, was initially homeless in London and now works for the NHS.

When a sufficient number of visitors collectively touch the floor, the huge image of the Syrian refugee is revealed, but it can only be seen in full by those standing at a distance. And uncovering the image is an “almost impossible task”, according to curators.

Frances Morris, Tate Modern director, said of needing “collective action” to make the portrait appear: “If 300 hot bodies came and lay down, we’d be very pleased.”

Bruguera said the aim of the installation was to provoke “forced empathy” through the physical reaction of tears.

She pairs this empathy with an “unsettling energy” that she creates through playing a low-frequency sound throughout the hall.

Catherine Wood, senior curator, said making people cry was inspired by emoji empathy, the idea that when people are sad they just text some tears.

She said: “The physical effect does remind you of real feelings and you see other people cry and it makes you want to cry with them.”

Bruguera described her piece as a “risk”, adding: “This is the kind of commission an artist wants but, as soon as you get it, you panic.”

A further unconventional element of the work is its title, which is the number of people who migrated from one country to another last year added to the number of migrant deaths recorded this year. It will change every day.

Visitors will have the number stamped on their hand. Yesterday it was 10,142,926. The new exhibition takes over the gallery’s entrance hall until the end of February and is the latest in the Tate’s Hyundai Commission series.

Previous installations have seen the space become home to more than 100million sunflower seeds, a spiralling slide and a dazzling sun. Last year,

‘This is the kind of commission an artist wants but, as soon as you get it, you panic’

the hall was frequented by visitors wanting a turn on its giant swings.

Morris said Bruguera’s artwork was “less about the space itself than any other previous project”.

She said it was an opportunity “to think about the contemporary migration crisis, taking it to a more palpable and deeply emotional understanding”.

The exhibition also aims to help make Tate Modern a “local museum” for those living close by who have not ever set foot in the world-famous gal- lery. Its north building has been renamed for a year in honour of Natalie Bell, a youth worker for SE1 United, a local charity.

Bruguera is known for exploring political issues in her work.

In 2008, she brought two policeman on horses into the Tate Modern to herd people around as part of a performance artwork that explored the politics of crowd control.

Her work is unpopular with the Cuban authorities, which have detained her on multiple occasions and have denounced her as a CIA operative.