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H-Box
Until Aug 17
This event has finished
Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
Rating:
© Tate Modern
By Ossian Ward

Posted: Fri Jul 25
Although it sounds like a receptacle for junkie paraphernalia, the H Box is actually a swish, space-age video pod currently perched on the Turbine Hall’s mezzanine for a month, after which it’ll take off to invade another museum. This nomadic collaboration between New York curator, Portuguese architect and Parisian fashion house (the ‘H’ stands for Hermès, by the way) all sounds suspiciously similar to Chanel’s mobile art container designed by Zaha Hadid, which was launched recently in Hong Kong and will be in London next June as part of its own whistle-stop world tour. While Hadid’s handbag-inspired container is 90 per cent architectural fantasy objet, at least H Box places the emphasis squarely on the newly commissioned works inside the jewellery box.

A bit more effort on the interior might not have gone amiss, though, as the ten-seater’s crappy bean-bag poufs and flimsy collapsibility don’t make for comfortable viewing, but at least some of the films are worth squatting for. Skip the UK’s offering – Alice Anderson’s hilariously clunky ‘Bluebeard’, about a girl with colourful facial hair who wonders whether anyone will ever love her (answer: no) – and instead get lost in ‘Oracle’ by Argentine artist Sebastián Diaz Morales, an intense collage of international imagery that reveals how man’s place in the world is both integral to its survival and yet placing us in impossible jeopardy. It starts off slow, amassing seemingly incongruous clips from Peru, Mexico and China of goldfish and plastic bags, but builds to a stunning portrait of humankind stuck in the centre of a roundabout or peering out of a faceless apartment block. If nothing else, then the glitzy H Box should act as a fashionable gateway drug into the rest of Tate’s superb year-round film and video programme.