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.
Report of the Legal Subcommittee is a print featuring a map of the stars, together with a found transcription of a recent United Nations meeting in which various international delegations declare frustration with their 40-year-old, ongoing efforts to devise a legal definition of outer space...
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...
Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works...
In this work the artist stages a humorously violent “intervention” against male-dominated cultures of art production in present-day China...
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...
La Sombra (The Shadow) is a video of Regina Jose Galindo performing with a moving Leopard tank...
Conceived as a large-scale mural-like projection, Color of History, Sweating Rocks is a neo-futuristic, hybrid film that combines cinematic language, collage, animation, and inventive forms to highlight the plight of the peoples of the Sahara—and refugees in general—who have been displaced by oil-mining....
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...
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...
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...