Anish Kapoor: TARATANTARA 1999

In the summer of 1999 during the conversion of the old Baltic Flour Mills into BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, there was a pause in the building works, affording the opportunity to enter the massive void inside the hollowed building.

For this interlude Anish Kapoor was commissioned to make a site- specific art work, using the building as part of the structure, to create a symbiosis of architecture and art.

His work was a double trumpet-shaped membrane of deep red, semi-translucent PVC, stretching the entire length of the building, over 50 meters long and more than 25 meters high at both ends.

Kapoor’s installation was titled TARATANTARA, it was open to the public from Wednesday 7 July until Wednesday 1 September 1999. This was the first ever artwork inside BALTIC and it marked a definite division between the past and the future, starting the creative life of the building which opened as BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in July 2002.