Since his appointment last April, Tate Modern director Chris Dercon has kept a relatively low profile, shying away from press as he settled in at the helm of the Tate's flagship museum.
His CV, though, speaks for itself. Dercon was director of Munich's Haus der Kunst for more than ten years, having also served as director of both the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Witte de With in Rotterdam, as well as having taken the post of MoMA PS1 program director in the late 1980s.
The charismatic Belgian has joined Tate Modern at a crucial point in its development: phase 1 of the new extension — the opening of the former power station's oil tanks — is due to be completed next July. These large spaces will host black boxes and galleries dedicated to live art. The grand opening is scheduled for 2016 with the unveiling of the planned new building designed by starchitects Herzog and de Meuron. The overall cost is £215 million ($339.3 million), and 30% of the hefty sum remains to be found.
Last week Tate Modern announced a new partnership with automobile giant BMW, who, for the next four years, will sponsor a series of performances commissioned exclusively for the Web. After the speeches, ARTINFO UK sat down with Dercon to talk interdisciplinarity, politics, and building development.
Visual art is an obvious main concern for a museum of contemporary art, but Tate Modern has already branched out in different directions, embracing other disciplines. How are you working to diversify the institution?
The public is throwing questions at us. Sometimes they touch upon visual art, sometimes they touch upon culture, most of the time they touch upon identity, religion, sexuality, family, sustainability. At the same time, artists are soaking up so many different things. In Arab countries, visual art is soaking up freedom of speech, or messages that cannot be said through cinema or literature because they are too fragile in this context. The visual arts are a sponge soaking up forms and ideas coming from elsewhere, and it's great for a museum to be able to create a platform.
That's why I'm very happy with this project [with BMW], because it's the first time that a sponsor is saying: "we don't know where we are going." It's probably a project on the move. It's about disruption, transformation. That's what a museum is for, and that's the reason why museums continue to expand. It's not because they want to become larger. The whole idea of the extension and expansion of the museum is trying to create mirrors, to create echoes, echo-machines, echo-rooms. The museum is like a chamber.
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