Explore the history of The Tanks at Tate Modern _ Tate

As you leave the turbine hall and turn right down into the tanks, there's a feeling of kind of compression of the space. You're going into a space with these incredible slanted columns. It feels like you've lost your bearings a little bit in a good way, I think, because it's not the white-walled pristine galleries anymore. It's rough concrete and there's a little bit of a trace of the smell of oil still, and strange markings on the walls, like runes that are left over from the building's industrial past. When the conversion of the Bankside Power Station was being planned for Tate Modern, we knew that there were these oil tank spaces, which were three giant round concrete chambers underground that used to house metal tanks for oil, and apparently oil tankers would come down the River Thames and there's a channel under the building where they could connect the pipes up and fill those tanks. So they'd had this industrial use. Now there are two that are open to the public, which is fantastic. We could have cleaned them up and made them easier, but what artists have really responded to in here is the character and the history that you feel from their industrial use. We used to say there's something between the white cube gallery and the black box of cinema, the grey zone. They have this kind of liminal quality and a totally different atmosphere, being underground and being round and having these raw concrete walls, and they're kind of slightly dirty and slightly unkempt in a way that just has this incredible character to them and atmosphere. The kind of work that we've programmed has been quite diverse really, but there's been an emphasis on performance film and installation, so practices that benefit from this grey darkened atmosphere. But really what's been extraordinary actually is that we've been able to give choreographers the opportunity to work in a spatial gallery environment instead of a theatre, so they've made things often that are more sculptural. Equally we've worked with sculptors like Rashida Reen or Tara Katui who show their performative sculptures in ways that connect to the live, so it's a kind of time-based space and that's been the main character in a way. It's a fantastic space for gathering. Artists have really responded to how they bring people together, how they stage bodies, and this is a kind of generator space, an engine space, you know the oil as a with practices that were being tested out live by artists and we really wanted that spirit to be reflected in how the collection displays were plotted throughout the entire building here. When we opened the Tanks in 2016 we developed a new model of a live exhibition and it was a kind of hybrid between an ordinary installation or exhibition and a festival I suppose, and usually we did that as a group exhibition, but in 2019 we invited the artist Anna Rimhof to take over the whole of the Tanks, the two large Tank spaces and the Transformer galleries in the foyer, and she did an incredible work, a 10-day long piece that was a four-hour durational choreography. The piece was titled Sex and it had this kind of choreography to do with power and hierarchy. I think the atmosphere of the work is very intense and immersive and very much in that kind of grey zone that the Tanks embody. I think we're at a really interesting point in the museum now after the pandemic where we're trying to be more located in our city, in our community, than we maybe ever were as an international art museum, and we're working really closely with our learning curators on work that is kind of founded in participation, and you know how can we activate the collection works like Tara Khatui and others instead of them just being on display, but how are they living objects that people can handle or participate in in the spirit that the artist intended. I think that's what these spaces will represent and really for me again as a generator space, how does that spirit permeate this whole building. I think they're really important spaces in that sense.