Since his appointment last April, Tate Modern director Chris Dercon has kept a relatively low profile, shying away from press as he settled in at the helm of the Tate's flagship museum. His CV, though, speaks for itself. Dercon was director of Munich's Haus der Kunst for more than ten years, having also served as director of both the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Witte de With in Rotterdam, as well as having taken the post of MoMA PS1 program director in the late 1980s.

The charismatic Belgian has joined Tate Modern at a crucial point in its development: phase 1 of the new extension — the opening of the former power station's oil tanks — is due to be completed next July. These large spaces will host black boxes and galleries dedicated to live art. The grand opening is scheduled for 2016 with the unveiling of the planned new building designed by starchitects Herzog and de Meuron. The overall cost is £215 million ($339.3 million), and 30% of the hefty sum remains to be found.

Last week Tate Modern announced a new partnership with automobile giant BMW, who, for the next four years, will sponsor a series of performances commissioned exclusively for the Web. After the speeches, ARTINFO UK sat down with Dercon to talk interdisciplinarity, politics, and building development.

Visual art is an obvious main concern for a museum of contemporary art, but Tate Modern has already branched out in different directions, embracing other disciplines. How are you working to diversify the institution?

The public is throwing questions at us. Sometimes they touch upon visual art, sometimes they touch upon culture, most of the time they touch upon identity, religion, sexuality, family, sustainability. At the same time, artists are soaking up so many different things. In Arab countries, visual art is soaking up freedom of speech, or messages that cannot be said through cinema or literature because they are too fragile in this context. The visual arts are a sponge soaking up forms and ideas coming from elsewhere, and it's great for a museum to be able to create a platform.

That's why I'm very happy with this project [with BMW], because it's the first time that a sponsor is saying: "we don't know where we are going." It's probably a project on the move. It's about disruption, transformation. That's what a museum is for, and that's the reason why museums continue to expand. It's not because they want to become larger. The whole idea of the extension and expansion of the museum is trying to create mirrors, to create echoes, echo-machines, echo-rooms. The museum is like a chamber.

What do you mean exactly when you say "the public is throwing questions at us?" How are they talking to you?

They talk to us through activity streams like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. We also know our members and trustees. And they want other things than just exhibitions. They say: "why don't you do this?"

We really have to start considering a museum like a mass medium, but we still don't know how it really functions, what are the rules and the laws. The reason why BMW is working with us, or Volkswagen with MoMA, is because you want to get to know the questions, the demands and the insecurities of your clients, of your users. One of the things we figured out is that we have many users who are not here, but out there. We've only started to get to know them since our director of Audiences and Media Marc Sands said: "look at what these people are wanting. They are living in New Delhi." Tate Modern is a brand like BMW.

Considering your work with corporate brands, is the future of public institutions private sponsorship?  

No. It's also trying to re-negotiate your ideas about governance. We are a public museum, and a public museum is a public good. It's a public freehold. So it's many kinds of partnerships, and public/private partnership is one of them. The question is not anymore if you want to do it, and when you are doing it, the question is how to do it. You have to find the right match.

Recent political trends in the UK present a threat to public arts funding. How has the Tate been affected by the coalition government's new arts policy?

We are affected by the fact that they have different opinions about what governance is. They also think that we have to go to the market much more than we did before. They might have other opinions about philanthropy, but in a way we already gave the answers to their questions. I think we are doing very well because we understand reality. The only difference might be that we appreciate different realities. There is not just one "big society."

The opening of the oil tanks is only the first step of Tate 2.0. Can you tell me more about what's going to happen after that?

The oil tanks are phase 1. After that, we are going to start level 1, level 2, level 3, level 4, through 11, and that's going to take another four years. Building is a serious thing, so we are very happy that we are able to open phase 1 in July. It's a fascinating process: creating a museum that is space for mental and bodily exercise. You are not just viewing and judging artworks like in the past, you want to participate. I think in the future, museums are going to become places where people would say: I would like to make art. You have to allow for these kinds of uncertainties and questions. That's the reason why I always use the words of Jean-Luc Godard: "Il faut rendre le possible probable, et le probable possible" — you have to make the possible probable and the probable possible.