Deep underground, amidst the curling roots of fig trees, there’s a portal through time. Cut from the layer cake of Sydney sandstone beneath the Domain, the Tank (as it’s known) was built as an underground exhibition space. It’s purpose is to host unique installations and artworks to transport ordinary humans into the distant future where gravitational waves have warped the basic structure of reality, or shuttle visitors into a steamy, rain-soaked version of the ancient past.
Lisa Catt, curator of contemporary international art, was part of the team of artists, architects and assorted arts professionals who created this mind-bending new gallery at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW). Working with acclaimed Argentinian-Peruvian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas, whose exhibition The End of Imagination is the first in the Tank, Catt and her crew transformed this disused Second World War oil reservoir into a cutting-edge exhibition space that tests the limits of what a museum can be.
“Opening with a show like Adrián’s curatorially declares something: that we are open to doing things differently,” she explains. “We’re open to grappling with complex ideas, to creating unconventional experiences for audiences, and handing a little bit of that control over to them.”
Aficionados will recognise Villar Rojas as the artist behind the massive, site-specific installations built from wood, wire and clay that have graced the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, or the menagerie of decaying concrete animals that floated on the Bosphorus during the Istanbul Biennial in 2015. The End of Imagination tracks Villar Rojas’s interest in time and change, but continues to develop the artist’s thinking on the role of conflict in the making of culture.
Constructed not long after the Japanese raid of Sydney Harbour in 1941, the Tank’s original use was to support the war effort, providing fuel reserves for the local fleet based across the harbour at Garden Island naval base. Repurposed after 80 long years, Villar Rojas was keen for his commission to recognise the history of this place. “For Adrian, there’s no real boundary between artwork and art space. He is interested in every square centimetre of a given space: everything generates meaning, from grand architectural details to something that could be as easily overlooked as electrical cables,” says Catt. “Adrian thought about that really deeply. What does it mean to be making in this space that carries this history of conflict, carries this history that not many people know about?”
Catt accompanied Villar Rojas on his first visit to the Tank, before Tokyo-based architects SANAA polished off its rough edges. This visit was an experience that stayed with the artist and drove the direction of the show. “It was pitch black, and there was this galaxy of beads of condensation on the ceiling, and the floor was still flooded by oil-slicked water. You had to enter the space by a scaffold structure, and there was only a couple of working lights,” Catt recalls. “It was really that initial visit that left such a lasting impression on Adrian, particularly the darkness. He really loved the shadows that were cast by our torches on the columns. When you go and see the new commission at the Art Gallery, you can see how this lingered in his mind with the moving lights that rove through the space. That was really an interpretation of that initial site visit.”
Encountering the twisted, crumbling and compressed forms that jut out between the concrete columns of the Tank, visitors will undoubtedly feel something of the strange and alien atmosphere witnessed by Villar Rojas and Catt. Driven by a visionary AI algorithm called “the Time Engine”, the Tank allows its travellers to experience what might have been if things were different, and maybe one day how they’ll be.
After The End of Imagination finishes in June, the Tank’s new chapter will continue: AGNSW’s summer series features a retrospective from beloved French artist Louise Bourgeois. Meanwhile, the Art Gallery’s planning to also use the space for interdisciplinary performance, dance, moving image and film. Other members of the public have suggested an alternative usage for the dystopian bunker – a drain rave. “It’s definitely come up in conversation,” Catt admits. “Everyone’s keen for a rave in there.”
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