Carla Chahrour

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama will make two of her immersive mirrored “infinity rooms” available to visit at Tate Modern in the United Kingdom from March. 29, 2021 to March. 27, 2022.

Originally scheduled to open in 2020 in celebration of the museum’s twentieth anniversary, the year-long focused exhibition will showcase Kusama’s installations that became the apotheosis of Instagrammable art—despite the fact that the Japanese artist started making them in 1965.

Serving as a testament to the prevailing power of immersive art in the digital age, Infinity Mirror Rooms at Tate Modern will allow audiences to enter two major experiential installations, view an early documentation of Kusama’s experimental performances alongside displays of film and photography, which provide insight into the historical context behind the global phenomenon that Kusama’s mirrored rooms have become today.

 It will feature one of Kusama’s largest installations to date “Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life” that was originally made for her 2012 retrospective at the museum and “Chandelier of Grief” a room which creates the illusion of a boundless universe of rotating chandeliers.

Yayoi Kusama’s Chandelier of Grief presented by a private collector, New York 2019. (Tate Modern)

These immersive artworks allow viewers to enter a small room covered with mirrors. Their adornments range from hanging colored lights, which perpetually multiply in the enclosed, reflective environment.

Kusama debuted one of her mirrored installations titled “Infinity Mirrored Room — Brilliance of the Souls” in Saudi Arabia at AlUla’s Maraya Concert Hall, in February last year.

The installation at AlUla, similar to the one in the UK, consisted of an entirely reflective space with water surrounding a small platform on the ground for visitors to stand on and where observers could instantly become immersed in a different, ethereal world.

This was created through spheres of multicolored lights that were hung at different intervals and heights from the ceiling, depicting the appearance of stars, planets and galaxies. The reflective element combined with lights transformed the small space in which the exhibition was held into a deceptively vast area, insulating the viewer from the outside world.

Kusama, a 90-year-old artist from Matsumoto, is widely acknowledged as one of the most important contemporary Japanese creatives.

Although her work is primarly executed through  sculpture or installation and is famous for her conceptual art, which shows attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, art brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, her impact on the field spreads beyond that as she also paints, contributes to performance art and dabbles in fashion as well as poetry.

At the age of 10, she began to experience vivid hallucinations which consisted of dense fields of dots. The Infinity Mirror Rooms that she is most well-known for were initially inspired by her earliest “Infinity Net” dot paintings that were developed using watercolor, gouache, and oil on paper.

Kusama’s installations are an attempt to share scenes from her experiences with hallucinations through immersing the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

Interested parties can visit the Infinity Mirrored Room as part of  the London institution’s dynamic program for the new year, taking place at Tate Modern until March. 27, 2022. Access to the exhibition will be free for Tate members with a ticket and will cost £10 for non-members, details of which can be found on the Tate Modern Website.