Miroslaw Balka

You will have heard about the Tate's big black box by now, but physically getting there is half the fear. Having never liked the central bridge and gloomy staircase of the Turbine Hall - it breaks up the space unnecessarily and makes you walk around or up it to see the other side - my approach to the latest Unilever Series commission induced a foreboding sense of déjà vu.

Walking to the far end involves passing under another more cramped, compressed version of the mezzanine's shelf, as though the ceiling had been lowered to just over head-height or perhaps you'd stumbled into the crawl spaces beneath the former power station's floor. The echoey noise of feet above replicates the experience of being herded into a metal pen, which is exactly how Miroslaw Balka's sculpture feels - like a dark holding bay or a giant container for the trafficking of humans.

At the height of the Final Solution, some 2,500 Jews a day were shunted in cattle trains to the Treblinka and Birkenau concentration camps in Balka's homeland, harrowing journeys retraced in films such as Claude Lanzmann's nine-hour documentary 'Shoah'. Deportees were separated at the Judenrampe, perhaps an inspiration for the slope that leads into Balka's cavernous black hole, but the experience at Tate Modern is, of course, nothing like as fraught with psychological terror as a one-way ticket to the Holocaust. The artist's constant referencing of this thorny subject is more like a background hum to this piece and not by any means its only benchmark, thankfully.

Entitled 'How It Is', there's also an anti-art-going message in this black hole, faced as you are with a giant full stop, like Malevich's 'Black Square' only enlarged to billboard size and three dimensions. Disappointingly, the pitch-blackness isn't black enough to really disturb and there are even cracks in the joins of the back walls, ruining the effect entirely. Just as that infernal bridge interrupts the view of 'How It Is', some careless execution mars its actual experience. In the spirit of critical integrity I came back later when the daylight had gone, but this was still not the daunting ne plus ultra of claustrophobic interaction I had dreaded, nor is the fear of nothingess - the horror vacui - anything new in art (op.cit. Malevich, cf. minimalism).