The three collaborating artists in Superflex, Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen

The first Tate Turbine Hall installation seventeen years ago featured the work of the surrealist Louise Bourgeois, since then, there have been many popular, bodily engaged installations such as Olafur Eliasson’s, Weather Project, and Carsten Holler’s polished stainless steel slides. With this year’s installation commissioned from the Danish art collective, Superflex, entitled ‘One, Two Three Swing’, the fun is back with an experiential attraction, a stimulation for body and mind. Superflex have a track record of provocative and collaborative work, from urban graphics to film and sound work, from their ‘flooded MacDonalds’ film to the remarkable ‘international’ playpark in Copenhagen, ‘Superkilin’.

The Tate Turbine Hall is officially designated a public street and the three collaborating artists in Superflex, Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, saw their work as sitting in a public space, crossing inside and outside, as well as operating at local, city and international levels. They wanted to enhance the surface of this public space and expand the project through the walls, crossing in a playful, and amusing way.

At the press launch, Bjorn explained the project, as being in three stages. The first stage is ‘apathy’. A huge thick rich carpet, stunningly designed, using the colours found in British bank notes, runs down the vast Turbine Hall ramp, this a place for the visitor to lie back and contemplate a huge reflective sphere, a Foucault pendulum, swinging above. This is ‘a place to consider a changing earth, society and self’, where the stare of apathy could be seen as the ‘last couple of hours of the Titantic’. The audience is caught by the hypnotic sphere interlinked, to movers and shakers on swings, pushing against consumption and global capitalism.

The second stage is ‘Production’, a micro-factory within the Tate for the making of the special swings, including an outreach gallery to request a swing in the wider community. The third stage is ‘Action’ and an orange (Superflex’s key colour) tubular structure weaves around the Turbine Hall and outside to create supports on which to hang the Superflex Swing, a long triple seat for collective movement.

Three people have to operate collectively and collaboratively in order to move the swing, ‘with enough people swinging together the earth’s rotation would be altered, and the pendulum movement would be changed’ the artists claimed. This is also a reflection on their working method, their collaborative process. A three by three collaboration in which individual (artist) is no longer the key element. The swings are aimed to travel over the next six months with the social and regenerative aim of their work, to many communities where divisions exist, and attempt to make connections.

Three people have to operate collectively and collaboratively in order to move the swing

As the urban art and architecture scene engaged with the reflective Danish artists and their swing, another reflective artist seat was being installed in a remarkable formal English landscape garden with later work by Lutyens and Jekyll in Somerset, Hestercombe. The British artist Jennie Savage, who has appeared with Superflex, designed a new fourteenth ‘seat’, for the gardens, there are thirteen older views and buildings across the historic gardens at Hestercombe. Her questioning of a consuming practice allows for a different collective experience of landscape.

Here her mirror is placed on an inverted diamond emoji, #Ilikeeverything, rather than the sphere of Superflex. This mirror deconstructs the historic English country landscape originally designed with its powerful and romantic framed views. The new work subverts this by fracturing the view, allowing for new collisions and reflections. The historic constructed view of 'nature' and all that means, is challenged by this fragmentation, while inside there is a camera obscura ordering and framing the natural world from outside to within.

The #Ilikeeverything seat, and Hestercombe, is a place to be lost and found, while at the Tate, a moving world is changing, following a wandering but unrelenting orange line, a production line of swings.