Europe
Tino Sehgal
This Exhibition
2004
Tino Sehgal, This Exhibition, 2004.
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.