Tino Sehgal

Tino Sehgal (born 1976) is a British-German artist based in Berlin. His works, which he calls "constructed situations", involve one or more people carrying out instructions conceived by the artist.

Early life and education

Sehgal's father, a member of the Sehgal family, "had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM"; his mother was "a German native and homemaker." Sehgal was born in London but grew up mostly in Düsseldorf and Paris; he studied political economy and dance at Humboldt University, Berlin and Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen. He danced in the companies of French experimental choreographers Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy. In 1999, Sehgal worked with the dance collective Les Ballets C. de la B. in Ghent, Belgium, and developed a piece entitled Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century, a series of movements performed in twenty different dance styles, from Vaslav Nijinsky to George Balanchine to Merce Cunningham, and so forth. The piece last 55 minutes as the artist performed completely naked on an empty stage lit by a single light. Encouraged by curator Jens Hoffmann, Sehgal began to work as an artist in 2000.

Works

What all of Sehgal's works have in common is that they reside only in the space and time they occupy, and in the memory of the work and its reception. The artist himself describes his works as 'constructed situations', whose materials are the human voice, language, movement, and interaction, without the production of physical objects. His pieces are choreographies that are regularly staged in museums or galleries, and continuously executed for the entire duration of a show. The reaction or even participation of the spectator gives the possibility for the work to actually happen. The artwork is the constructed situation which arises between the audience and the interpreters of the piece. Afterwards, the work of art will exist only in the world of experience and memory of those who directly experienced it. Sehgal's work can be neither photographed nor illustrated; no documentation or reproduction is allowed, in order to focus all the attention on the physical evidence. For his choreographies, Sehgal regularly auditions men and women of all ages, including actors, dancers, professional singers, and ordinary people with different backgrounds. The people who are selected to interpret his work are then camouflaged among the guards and the visitors. In 2012, he will present a newly commissioned work for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London.

For (Untitled) (1997-2003), in between the dance ensemble table-dancing to Beyoncé‘s ‘Bootylicious’ (2001), Sehgal gave a lecture on market theory, including growth-rate diagrams. In 2000, his work Instead of Allowing Some Thing to Rise Up to Your Face Dancing Bruce and Dan and Other Things appropriated conceptual pieces by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. In This is So Contemporary (2005), as though possessed, museum guards surround the public and break out into a joyful, unsettling dance. Sehgal’s work Kiss (2007), exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was his first work in an American museum. Presented in association with the MCA’s show "Collection Highlights," Kiss is a sculptural work—two dancers kiss and touch, eventually resembling embracing couples from historical works of art; the work is appropriating, one after the other, the different amorous poses in Auguste Rodin's The Kiss (1889), Constantin Brancusi's The Kiss (1908), Gustav Klimt's The Kiss (1907-08), Jeff Koons and La Cicciolina's Made in Heaven (1990-91) and various Gustave Courbet paintings from the 1860s. In Sehgal's 2010 work This Progress at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the artist empties Frank Lloyd Wright's famed spiral gallery of all art work. The museum visitor is met at the base of the spiral by a child, who asks a small group what they think progress is. As they begin their ascent up the spiral ramp the visitors continue their conversation until they are met by a high school student who picks up the conversation. Further still, they are met by a young adult and lastly an older adult who finishes their ascent to the upper-most point in the Guggenheim. For This is New a museum attendant barks out headlines from the day's paper to visitors. In "This Success/This Failure" young children attempt to play without using objects and sometimes draw visitors into their games. For This is Good (2001) a museum worker waves their arms and hops from one leg to the other, then states the title of the piece. In This is Propaganda (2002) a museum guard sings a song with the lyrics "This is propaganda/you know/you know" twice, then announces the title and year of the work, each time a visitor enters the room. For This objective of that object (2004) the visitor becomes surrounded by five people who remain with their backs to the visitors. The five chant, "The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion," and if the visitor does not respond they slowly sink to the ground. If the visitor says something they begin a discussion. His most complex work, This Situation (2007), required the participation of a group of intellectuals. They occupied an otherwise empty gallery space and interacted with each other and the audience in accordance with a set of rules and games established by the artist.

Exhibitions

Sehgal is the youngest artist to have represented Germany at the Venice Biennale (in 2005, together with Thomas Scheibitz). Sehgal had solo exhibitions at a number of important venues including the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2007); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2007, 2006, 2005); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2006), Kunstverein Hamburg (2006), Serralves Foundation, Porto (2005); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes (2004). The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts presented Sehgal's first solo exhibition in the United States in 2007. In 2008, the Nicola Trussardi Foundation has presented Sehgal’s first major exhibition in Italy in the setting of Villa Reale, one of the most spectacular historic buildings in Milan. He has also participated in the Lyon Bienniale, France (2007); the Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2006); the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005); the Venice Bienniale / Utopia Station (2003); as well as Manifesta, Frankfurt, Germany (2002). In 2011, Sehgal was chosen to co-curate a retrospective of Félix González-Torres at Museum für Moderne Kunst.

Sehgal received the Bâloise Prize at Art Basel, Switzerland, in 2004. In 2006, he was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize, and in 2007 for the Preis der Nationalgalerie für Junge Kunst at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

Collections

On the sale of his work, Sehgal stipulates that there is no written set of instructions, no written receipt, no catalogue and no pictures. The conversation that constitutes a Tino Sehgal sale consists of his talking to the buyer (usually a representative from a museum) before a notary and witnesses about five legal stipulations of the purchase: that the work be installed only by someone whom Seh­gal himself has authorized via training and prior collaboration; that the people enacting the piece be paid an agreed-upon minimum; that the work be shown over a minimum period of six weeks (in order to avoid seeming more like a theatrical event than an art exhibition); that the piece not be photographed; and that if the buyer resells the work, he does so with this same oral contract. This means that his work is not documented in any way. Sehgal's work is held, among others, in the collections of the Tate, the Stedelijk Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Hamburger Bahnhof.

External links

• 2007 "Kultureflash" interview
• 2005 Audio Arts interview
• Frieze article
• Frieze review of ICA show
• The Independent review of ICA show
• Sight and Sound profile
• Art in America review of ICA show
• Tino Sehgal at Fondazione Nicola Trussardi
• "A Progress: Or, One Foot in Front of the Other" review of Guggenheim show from n+1
• Tino Sehgal at the Aubette in Strasbourg