SUPERFLEX. One Two Three Swing!

An orange line through the hall

In October 2017 the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London opened with a work people did not stand and look at. They sat on it. This was One Two Three Swing! by the Danish collective SUPERFLEX, the third Hyundai Commission, a series of works made for this hall.

An orange steel line ran through the space. It curved, rose, dropped, turned. From it hung swings. Each had three seats.

The line did not stop at the wall. According to Tate, it crossed the gallery and emerged in the landscape to the south of the building. Outside, passers by could sit on it too.

The work ran from 3 October 2017 to 2 April 2018, free to all. The outdoor swings by the South Tanks stayed until 4 November 2018.

Three people, one rhythm

Alone on a swing, you push yourself. Three on one swing have to watch each other. Who kicks, who leans back, and when. Out of rhythm, the swing wobbles and goes nowhere. In rhythm, it flies.

SUPERFLEX describe the work as a human powered pendulum. The swing turns potential energy into shared movement. The riders use gravity itself, building up to the point where falling turns into flying.

Tate wrote that swinging with two others holds more potential than swinging alone, and that the shared energy of three resists gravity. It is a sentence about physics. It is also a sentence about living together.

The three on a swing are often strangers who happened to be standing nearby. A few swings are enough to make them talk, laugh when they fall out of step, count: one, two, three.

The collective and play

SUPERFLEX was founded in 1993 by three Danish artists: Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger and Rasmus Nielsen. Tate introduces them through playfully subversive installations and films. They work as a collective, and many of their works are only complete when others take part.

With One Two Three Swing!, SUPERFLEX speak of the power of play and the possibilities of working together. They call it an experiment in activating collective energy. The word experiment matters. No one knows in advance how high three strangers will go.

On the work's page Tate quotes someone who had not been on a swing for more years than they would admit, and felt rebooted the moment they sat down. Many adults probably felt the same. A swing is a child's toy. Grown ups rarely give themselves permission to use one in public.

The Turbine Hall has invited people into unusual behaviour before. In 2010 Ai Weiwei covered its floor with millions of porcelain sunflower seeds. SUPERFLEX went a step further: not only entering the work, but setting it in motion.

The line goes on

After London the work kept travelling. According to SUPERFLEX, One Two Three Swing! was installed temporarily in Bonn and Copenhagen in 2018, then at the Dora Observatory for the Real DMZ Project in 2019, near the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas. In 2020 came two permanent versions, one in AlUla for Desert X and one in Vordingborg, Denmark. In 2023 another permanent version was placed at Dorasan Station.

In each place the orange line means something different. In a London museum it is play. Near a dividing border, three people swinging together can become an image of crossing over. The collective says the line stretches beyond the gallery walls into the urban landscape and the wider world. As if it had no end.

The work does not ask to be understood. It only asks you to sit down, hold the rope, and wait for the two people beside you.