Institute of Contemporary Arts

Screaming kids

Date: 29 January 2007

Kids taking part in Tino Sehgal 2007. © Danny Birchall, 2007, Tino Sehgal, 2007.

A little girl comes up to me in the lower gallery.

"Excuse me," she says (she's only about waist height, so I have to bend down to hear her properly), "my name's Ella, and I'd like to tell you that this exhibition should be called 'This success'".

"Why's that?" I ask.

"Because we're having a really good time here."

I'm a little nonplussed, and not just because it's so rare for an ICA show to get such an unambiguous rave reception on its first day. It's partly because the lower gallery is also full of Ella's mates, running up and down, playing games and (in a modest kind of way) screaming their little heads off.

This is the long-awaited Tino Sehgal 2007, provisionally entitled either 'This success' or This failure'. The children play, and then they themselves judge the experiment to be either a success or a failure.

Tino's work is about interaction between human beings. Deprived of objects to invest meaning in, a bunch of kids set free to play in an art gallery will, he hopes, invent new games to play and come up with new ways of interacting. On last Wednesday's full dress rehearsal, the shouts of "bulldog! bulldog!" went up, and pretty soon it was an end-to-end race up and down the gallery, kids swerving out of each others' way like dodgeball players, and I spent the afternoon trying to remember the rules and what it was called after it was banned and went underground (like terrorist organisations, you can never really proscribe a playground game).

Kids involved in unstructured play brings back some fond memories of the playground, and a little sigh of relief that the simple joys of childhood haven't (of course) been eaten by Nintendo, but there are less pleasant echoes of being young in there too. At that age I would have been mortified to be deprived of a book to sit in a corner and read while everybody else got on with the running around. Here, the less boisterous kids go round in twos or threes, arm in arm, or sit against a wall and talk. They also seem unnervingly ready to chat to visitors.

For some round here, though, the thought of four weeks of the lower gallery sounding like a swimming pool on a Saturday morning (there's a powerful echo to the stripped-back white cube) requires some strengthening of the nerve, and perhaps some earplugs.

But the ICA changes with its audience: a festival or event can give the place a different character from day to day. So for the next four weeks we have a children-flavoured ICA. There's something quite heartening about that. I'm the kind of person who gets annoyed when someone with a three-wheeled buggy steals my seat in a cafe on a Saturday, but out there in the suburbs it's the parents who are the worst part of being around kids. By themselves, they're charming, cheering, and better value-for-money than most things you'd find in a formaldehyde tank. If you ask me, the kids are alright.