Performance artist Tino Sehgal challenges both institutions and visitors to reconsider their definitions of art through his “constructed situations.” Aiming to combat mass production in the art world by relying on what is already present, Sehgal uses body movements and spoken word to engage audiences. Sehgal’s work is immaterial and ephemeral: no physical documentation of his work is allowed. The artist forbids photographs, videos, and even written instructions for the work. Through these strategies, Sehgal challenges the idea that objects make the artwork.
Early Life and Experiments
Sehgal was born to a German mother and a British Indian father in 1976 and grew up in London and Berlin. As a university student at the University of the Arts in Essen, Seghal studied political economics and modern dance. During this time, he occasionally danced for choreographers Jérôme Bel and Xavier Le Roy. Through these experiences with movement, Sehgal began to consider and question art as the production of objects as well as Western society’s economic affluence. Channeling this distaste for mass-production and consumption, Sehgal began creating “constructed situations:” artworks based on the interrelation between their “interpreters,” the spaces in which they take place, and the audiences of art institutions. In these works, Sehgal employs language, dance, song, and other modes of expression to create ephemeral and immaterial experiences.
Significant Works
Sehgal’s earliest works drew from and worked within the canons of dance and art history. Twenty Minutes for the 20th Century (1999) pays tribute to influential choreographers from the twentieth century including Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham, and Trisha Brown. Performing nude on stage, Sehgal’s performance samples signature movements from twenty influential choreographers. Another early piece, Instead of allowing some thing to rise up to your face dancing bruce and dan and other things (2000), functions as a conceptual critique of the celebrated American artists Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. In Instead of allowing, one of Sehgal’s performers (whom the artist refers to as “interpreters” of the work) “quotes” body movements from Nauman’s video Wall-Floor Positions (1968) and Graham’s Roll (1970), performing the movements on the floor of the exhibition space.
Later, Sehgal moved on from these quotational gestures, creating constructed situations that aim to critique both the West and mass production. Interested in disrupting idea that the role of the museum visitor is passive, Sehgal began to engage visitors with his series This. This objective of that object (2004), for example, sends interpreters in plain clothing into the gallery when a visitor enters. During the performance, the interpreters walk around backwards, repeating a low chant: “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” As the interpreters get closer to the visitors and the volume of the chant increases, the quandary of engagement is put to the viewer. If visitors do not engage with the interpreters, the interpreters drop to the ground. Visitors who do engage with the work are met with enthusiasm, followed with a semi-scripted conversation.
This success/This failure (2006) is enacted by groups of elementary school children. The students are tasked with playing in the space of the gallery, using the empty room and their imagination to create the work’s invisible object. When visitors enter the gallery, they are drawn into the children’s “game”—and its internal logic. The children are the determiners of the work, declaring their game a success or a failure, while the visitors’ perceptions serve to bolster or counter this judgment.
Recognition & Legacy
Sehgal’s work has been shown and celebrated internationally since his emergence in the early 2000s. He has had solo exhibitions at venues including Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France (2004); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2007); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2005, 2006, and 2007); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2007–2012); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2007); Tate Modern, London (2012); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016). In 2010 at the age of 35, Sehgal became the youngest artist granted a solo show in the Guggenheim Museum’s New York rotunda. He was also the youngest artist to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale, which he did in 2005 with artist Thomas Scheibitz. In 2013, Sehgal was nominated for the Turner Prize and that same year was awarded the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion prize.
“I always wanted to work in art, but it was just not easy to be an artist who does not produce any objects, so I had to find my way somehow. I knew that I wanted to work with singing and spoken word because I found that their mode of producing—transforming actions—was politically interesting. I wanted to invest in these media on a craftsmanship level so that I could deal with them.” —Tino Sehgal, from an interview with Silvia Sgualdini, 2005
)