Hyundai Commission: Cecilia Vicuña Brain Forest Quipu at Tate Modern Turbine Hall is poetic and beautiful

Two vast hanging sculptures are at opposite ends of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. They use its full height, 27 metres from floor to ceiling. Cecilia Vicuña has used a wealth of textiles and materials: rope, twine, wool, wire, netted cardboard. Everything is white.

Up close you see that the Chilean artist, working with women from local Latin American communities, has engaged in a very London activity: mudlarking.

She lived here in the 1970s, a young artist and poet, first as a student and then as a refugee from General Pinochet’s authoritarian clampdown on Chilean intellectuals and cultural figures. And in that earlier time in London, she loved the Thames.

She would go onto its beaches and touch the water. So here, amid the hanging, tumbling, knotted textiles are objects washed up at low tide on the shore nearby: clay pipe fragments, pottery sherds, mussel shells. Spotlit, the sculptures cast monumental, beautiful shadows on the walls.

Vicuña has revivified an ancient Andean cultural form: the quipu. These complex textile structures were formed from strands, knots and objects, and used for everything from record keeping to charting cosmologies. Vicuña sees her Tate versions as a memorial for colonial violence against indigenous peoples and the destruction of native territories.

They’re absorbing things: the one at the eastern end of the Turbine Hall is denser, thicker, with broad swathes of textiles throughout, while at the western end, the central part of the suspended form is more open and airy. Within both are smaller, simpler quipus, which are closer to the ancient forms of the object.

At the top of the two sculptures is a big circular ring that supports all the dangling material. From beneath, there’s a lovely effect where the circles supporting the smaller quipus are like ripples from that largest, highest ring.

Bursts of sound can be heard within them. Gentle singing – both playful and plaintive – echoes through the space. You might hear chirping crickets, drums, a lone pipe or yidaki, or full bands – the sounds of indigenous lands and communities. A film nearby features footage documenting indigenous struggles – the activities they engage in to mark and protect their land, the central importance of rainforests to our global climate and shameful political neglect and wilful destruction.

The most conceptual aspect of the project is Vicuña’s notion of a “brain forest”, about the rainforest as a metaphor for the complexity of the human mind and brain matter. This is again based on the quipu’s ancient significance, as a means of recording everything from the smallest everyday details to entire belief systems. She is attempting to tap into that ancient spirit that saw an interconnectedness between human bodies, social structures, territorial and astrological mapping, and spiritual beliefs.

The installation’s whiteness signifies ghostliness – forests destroyed, trees made ashen. And the sounds are spectral too; a reminder that rainforests are cultural as well as natural spaces, and the lived experience they evoke will be lost if the climate emergency isn’t urgently halted. For all its poetic beauty and lightness, this is a sombre work.

Tomorrow, until April 16; tate.org.uk