This spring, the Tate Modern, London's premier institution for international modern and contemporary art redesigned by Herzog & de Meuron from the original building by Giles Gilbert Scott, will celebrate 25 years since its opening in 2000. Located in a disused power station on the banks of the Thames, the Tate Modern has transformed London's Bankside landscape and its cultural and educational offerings.
It remains one of the most popular galleries in the world.
To celebrate, the museum will host an extensive weekend from 9th to 12th May, featuring a variety of immersive activities designed to engage both the mind and the senses. Highlights will include free exhibitions, live musical performances, discussions, and curator-led tours.
In conjunction with the anniversary, the museum will unveil a series of recent acquisitions throughout the space, alongside a reinstallation of seminal works that have defined Tate Modern’s identity.
A focal point of this celebration will be Louise Bourgeois’s monumental bronze sculpture, Maman (1999), a spider that stands an impressive 10 meters tall.
This iconic piece, previously the inaugural artwork encountered by visitors upon Tate Modern's 2000 opening, will return to the Turbine Hall after 25 years.
Maman will be a conceptual anchor for a newly curated trail encompassing 25 pivotal artworks strategically installed across the museum. The trail includes the revered Mark Rothko Seagram murals (1958), and the return of Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943) from the major Surrealism retrospective at Centre Pompidou.
From the pages of his blog Waldemar Januszczak, the chief art critic for The Sunday Times, recalled attending Tate Modern's opening day. As the head of art at Channel 4, he was commissioned to produce a series of documentaries on Herzog & de Meuron's redesign project leading up to the opening: "The official opening of the gallery in May 2000 was performed by the Queen. She wore duck egg blue, while the new mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was in socialist grey. I was there as well, but so tiny was our monarch as she wandered down Tate Modern’s looming Turbine Hall that she may as well have been an ant on a football field. A giant metal spider, created by Louise Bourgeois, heavy-lifted onto the central platform, gave the event a memorable emotional heft. The Queen was tiny. The spider was enormous. It all felt like a changing of the gods."
Louise Bourgeois, installation view of Maman, 1999, in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, 2000. Photo by Tate Photography. Courtesy of Tate Modern.
The anniversary weekend will also feature two new free exhibitions, each highlighting contemporary artistic responses to urgent social issues. "A Year in Art: 2050" will investigate artists’ visions of potential futures, featuring works that range from Umberto Boccioni's Futurist sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space to contemporary artist Ayoung Kim and his computer-generated animation. Meanwhile, the exhibition "Gathering Ground" will present a curated selection of international contemporary artworks that reflect a profound engagement with land and community, addressing the interplay between ecological crises and social equity. New additions to Tate's collection by artists such as Outi Pieski, Carolina Caycedo, and Edgar Calel will be showcased alongside a specially commissioned participatory installation by Abbas Zahedi.
Recognized as the most significant architectural building of the year 2000, Tate Modern exemplifies the transformation of a former industrial space into a distinctive cultural institution - a model that continues to be studied and adopted worldwide.
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