An environment that must be listened to, touched, navigated, and absorbed
Nora Chipaumire’s newest exhibition, Gadzi, has fully taken hold of the Tate Modern’s East Tank space, creating an experience that impacts the viewer from every angle, writes Leo Dunlop.
Derived from Gadziguru, the oldest female presence in Zimbabwean culture, Gadzi is utterly rooted in the land, rock, and ancestry of the country’s history. Even without prior knowledge, the viewer is drawn into its orbit. Hidden amongst the large-scale rocks balanced upon one another are clues that pull you deeper into the work, fragments that seem to speak from within the stone itself and reward the viewer’s interrogation.
Chipaumire has curated a space alive with music, tone, and touch. Large wooden amplifiers and speakers are scattered throughout the installation, smuggled into the rock formations or positioned around a central performance space. What emerges from these objects is not simply sound, but vibration. The audience is asked to physically experience the space: to feel the textures of the rock beneath their hands and the pulse of the music beneath their feet.
What Chipaumire has created is a sensory collage that shifts depending on where you stand. As you walk, turn, or pause, the soundscape changes around you. The experience remains fluid, constantly reshaped by your position within the space. Few exhibitions demand such active and dynamic participation from the viewer.
The sense of artifice within the installation becomes one of its most compelling qualities. The inner workings of the rock structures remain visible; scaffolding, timber supports, and practical mechanisms are left exposed. Like glimpsing behind the scenes of a theatre production, these revelations foreground the act of making itself. The work feels simultaneously finished and unfinished, allowing the viewer to encounter both the illusion and its construction.
These openings and omissions create opportunities for discovery. You find yourself peering through gaps in the rocks, discovering unexpected perspectives, hidden water containers repurposed as lights. The viewer is given the freedom to curate their own composition of sound, sight, and touch, assembling the exhibition anew with every movement through it.
It is a playful space, one that rewards repeated encounters. New details emerge on each circuit of the work: mysterious pools of water, fragments of song, sounds that seem familiar yet subtly transformed. The exhibition resists remaining fixed. It changes as you move through it. And don’t forget to look up. You may find the subject of the entire piece waiting somewhere above you.
Gadzi is an exciting addition to Tate Modern’s programme, one that fully embraces the possibilities of the East Tank space. Chipaumire has created an installation that refuses passive observation, instead inviting visitors into an environment that must be listened to, touched, navigated, and absorbed. In doing so, it subverts one of the most familiar instructions of the gallery and museum space: “Look, but don’t touch.”
New performances devised by Chipaumire will take place in the East Tank, 26-28 June 2026.
Performance times: 26 June at 7 pm, and 27 and 28 June at 3 pm.
The free exhibition runs until the 23rd of August 2026 at Tate Modern’s East Tank, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG.
