Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space. Upon hitting the cold, hard gallery floor, the seemingly confused interpreter writhes slowly on the ground while reciting a few lines from the curatorial statement in a whispered moan.
Tino Sehgal is an artist, dancer and choreographer. His work most commonly takes form in what he calls “constructed situations” activated time-based pieces that rely on the live encounters between spectators and those enacting the work. Sehgal’s work has been challenging the perception and conception of what are commonly framed as artworks, overcoming their materiality to focus on the fleeting gestures and social subtleties of shared experiences. Sehgal’s practice is informed by both his training as a dancer, subtly referencing the history of dance and, more broadly, of modern and contemporary art, and his education in economics, as his work is framed in a tight and elaborated critical and conceptual discourse that questions value, meaning, commodity and capital. Producing immaterial, ephemeral, reproducible but often unpredictable pieces, Sehgal’s works elude categorization and raise questions on the ecological impact of our current production systems, as well as on the relationship art holds with its market and agents.
“Product Recall” is a video perfomative pun on the action recalling memories in the form of a psychoanalytic session and the recall of faulty products from multinational corporations...
Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience...
In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
In the work titled The Glossies (1980), an affinity for photography manifested itself before McCollum actually began to use photography as a medium...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...