It’s been quite some time ago - and probably some of you who had a recent visit to the Turbine Hall would have seen it already - but last October, Ab Rogers Design had installed 3 gigantic donation boxes in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern.
Image courtesy of John Short
Image courtesy of John Short
The larger-than-life boxes are deliberately prominent and difficult to miss, standing 2.7 meters tall and 1.5 meters wide. Yet their transparent acrylic construction offers very little to interrupt the visitor’s view: only a sign and a series of luminous coin deflectors. They are windows rather than monuments, inviting visitors to look through them as much as at them.
Visitors stretch to reach the highest slot they can. Their coins drop into the slot and ricochet through a series of colourful coin deflectors before falling with a clink to the bottom of the donation box. Each donation transforms this minimal construction into a kinetic composition of colour, light and sound.
