May 30th, 2022
Today our group visited the Tate Modern Museum; one of the largest modern art museums in the world! It was incredibly fascinating to view so many pieces and modes of art, especially with the number of installations that the museum had. Two pieces of art that stuck out to me were Meredith Frampton’s Portrait of a Young Woman (1935) and Cildo Meireles’s Babel (2001). Firstly, Frampton’s piece is elegant and beautiful, as it depicts a woman standing in contrapposto stance, which symbolizes a more poised and relaxed state of being. When viewing this piece, I see the woman being closely tied to the arts, as the cello sits next to her along with a flower. She is painted in such a realistic way that it appears to not even be a painting at all, but rather an actual woman standing in front of you.
The other piece of art actually took my breath away. Concerned with the effects of mass communication, Meireles seeks to showcase the noise of the world through the radios stacked upon other radios. It was quite remarkable, as each of the radios were playing different sounds, making it so the person viewing the piece could not make out anything remotely coherent about what each radio was sharing. I felt that this piece was deep through these remarks, as the effects of mass communication ultimately leads to mass confusion. In my opinion, Babel was one of the most moving pieces in the Tate Modern Museum because it reminded me that we live in a world that lives dispositionally, relying on quick news cycles that makes the world suffocating at times.
After visiting the Tate museum, I grabbed a BBQ wrap from Borough market and then I tried Bienenstich (or Bee Sting Cake) for the first time. It was quite remarkably one of the best desserts I have had in a long time, and it is safe to say that I will be going back to that stand on Wednesday when we go to Sky Gardens and have lunch at Borough market!
– Maggie Martin
Theatre in London U of A 