My friend Tim came running down the massive Turbine Hall to find me. “You’ve got to come see this. It’s terrifying.”

We’d just entered the Tate Modern in London, and Tim had gone ahead while I’d stopped in the gift shop to look for a museum guidebook. The Tate Modern is housed in the shell of the former Bankside Power Station, and the entrance takes you immediately into the hall where the turbines were located. The Tate Modern commissions contemporary artists to create installation art at an unusually epic scale, especially for an indoor space, and are guaranteed a large audience of Londoners as well as international visitors. It’s become popular with artists and museum-goers, both relishing the opportunities afforded by this space.

Although I vaguely understood that Tim must be referring to the current installation—there wasn’t anything else around—I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. The art installed in the Turbine Hall when we visited last December was, simply, an enormous dark steel container. It was forbidding in size but otherwise not especially frightening. It stood on legs just high enough for visitors to walk under it and reach up to touch the girded metal, and, at forty-two feet high, it stood more than three times taller than a standard eighteen-wheeler. Tim dragged me around to the other side of the metal box. It looked like its lid had hinged opened, forming a gently inclined ramp that apparently led straight into the heart of darkness.

“What’s in there?” I asked Tim.

“I have no idea. I walked a few steps in, found it absolutely terrifying, and came to get you.”

We walked up the ramp and slowed as we neared the impenetrable blackness. The inside of the container was lined with black velvet and the floor was painted black, absorbing any light beams that might have lost their way. Tim and I instinctively put our hands in front of us as though navigating a dark hallway. And though I’ve long held the belief that art can’t hurt you, I was surely about to be proven wrong. I’ve had some near-religious experiences with art before, but nothing that made me worry for my physical well-being. Nothing that made me grab my friend’s arm so we could go down together. This was a blackness so thick it enveloped you, like the darkest part of a nightmare, like what the world will look like just before it is extinguished. A blackness that awakened in you any dormant fears of being buried alive, or of being smothered, or of screaming for help into a deaf void.

Unable to see even the shadows of the other museum-goers around us, we moved into the blackness, waving our hands in front of us with what must have been comic urgency. The nervous giggles of the other museum visitors became whispers. I apologized to Tim for making fun of him for coming to get me. We shuffled slowly, scared that we would run into somebody, or something, without warning. Even from the outside, the metal container appeared to stretch forever (only ninety-eight feet, actually).

We stumbled further, getting a little giddy on our own bravery as we resisted the urge to turn around to look for the light behind us.

Thump.

We’d hit, literally, a wall, covered in more black velvet, soft but not padded. It couldn’t have been at more than three-quarters the length of the container, or maybe even half. The artist knew that people would be walking far too slowly to ever actually hurt themselves.

We turned around, and my pupils rapidly acclimated to the light glowing from the front of the box—not so very far away—backlighting the figures who stumbled forward as we just had, arms waving, feet shuffling. It was easy to avoid them, but they had no way of knowing that as they groped through the blackness arms-first.

*     *     *
Miroslaw Balka, the man responsible for this experience, is a Polish-born artist whose intense, spatial installations often carry the tragic undertones of his country’s history. It’s no accident that this installation resembles, both physically and psychically, a shipping container or gas chamber. The work is entitled How It Is, suggesting that the collective memory Balka is tapping into is a grave one indeed. With How It Is, Balka has achieved an experience both vast and suffocating, collective and personal. It echoes the nightmares of a nation and the phobias of an individual.

We approached How It Is later that afternoon, after we’d seen several exhibits in the main part of the museum. Tim was apprehensive, but I insisted. I wanted to know how it would change—if it would change—if we knew that what awaited us was a soft bump against a velveted wall.

Having already walked through How It Is doesn’t erase all the questions. It’s still impossible to gage exactly when you’ll hit the wall. It’s still impossible to see the figures dodging you on their way out. The impenetrable blackness is no less dense, nor does it cease to awaken the fears of your personal or collective conscious, though perhaps the knowledge of the piece gave us more control over our emotions; we still kept our arms in front of us, but stood up straighter, carried less of the weight of the darkness with us.

And after our second trip inside, I turned to face the light, and, despite Tim’s protestations, ran out, easily dodging the people entering for the first time. Maybe art can hurt us, but if it is so powerful, then maybe it can also save us.

Photo “Abstract (Light reflection on metal boxes)” by tanakawho on Flickr. See “How It Is” at the Tate Modern website.