A tolling church bell has joined the summer sounds of birdsong and tinkling fountains in Kensington Gardens, announcing the arrival of an unusual sacred space. Standing among the trees as a brooding black cylinder, this year’s Serpentine pavilion, titled Black Chapel, is one of the more sombre structures built for the annual commission so far, designed as a place for quiet contemplation, meditation and sacred music (and a bit of raucous dancing, too).
“I want it to be somewhere where people can be together in silence, be with their thoughts and rest,” said Theaster Gates, the Chicago-based artist behind this year’s pavilion. “But it can also be an amplifier and a resonator, a place where great music can happen, where we can sing together and dance.”
Part industrial, part spiritual, the pavilion feels like a funerary chapel built inside a converted gasometer. A narrow black boardwalk slices across the freshly laid lawn outside the gallery, leading towards a tall thin doorway cut into the momentous timber drum, beckoning visitors within. Inside, a continuous bench runs around the edge of the vast cylindrical volume, while vertical wooden trusses support plywood panelled walls, rising to a shallow domed roof punctured by a single gaping oculus.
Every surface is drenched with inky black stain, creating an atmospheric backdrop for seven square panels that shimmer in the gloom, hanging on the wall like an enigmatic altarpiece. A late addition to the pavilion, these are some of Gates’s tar paintings, made from layers of blowtorched silvery bitumen roofing material (known as “torch down” in the US), prompted in part by the recent death of his father, who was a roofer by trade.
