One floor above the Tanks in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is a commissioned work by the Danish artists Superflex, who have created several large connected swing sets on which visitors to the museum can play and photograph themselves. And because they are juxtaposed wildly, if unintentionally, with the museum itself, and its visitors, deeply enmeshed as they are in the systems of human and capital flow that comprise the roots of the suffering depicted in these subterranean spaces.

Though neither Ogboh’s or Kanwar’s works are brand new, they both manage to feel urgent, not least because both of the crises they examine have not abated. For some installations, they likely lend themselves as neutral backgrounds to whatever art is displayed within for the two newest arrivals to the Tanks, Emeka Ogboh’s The Way Earthly Things Are Going and Amar Kanwar’s The Lightning Testimonies, their utilitarian grayness and smooth, cold walls are integral to the crushing human experience that each conveys.

Inside each tank, there is little in the way of overhead lighting, meaning that the enormity of the void you’re standing in dawns on you gradually, rather than announces itself. Down there, it is quieter and calmer than the floor above, and a chill in the air lets you know that you’re underground. To get to them, you descend a hulking, unbroken staircase, itself a marvel of construction, and emerge in the middle of a network of three cavernous cylinders, two of which now constitute temporary exhibition spaces. The Tanks, under the Blavatnik Building at the Tate Modern, are giant, hollowed-out concrete chambers that used to hold thousands of tons of oil, back when the museum was the Bankside Power Station.

Tate modern tate modern oil tank walls