Tino Sehgal

Tino Sehgal creates what he calls “staged situations” – ephemeral, often interactive scenarios played out by a variety of collaborators, including dancers, academics, children, museum guards, and others. Though his works are occasionally playful – for his work This Is So Contemporary he instructed a number of museum guards at the German pavilion of the 2005 Venice Biennale to break into a choreographed dance while calling out “This is so contemporary!” – his practice is extremely rigorous, with Sehgal intimately involving himself in every stage of his work’s production, exhibition, and distribution. No video or photographic documentation of his work exists, because he takes pains to ensure that whenever his “situations” are staged cameras are not permitted under any circumstances. Documentation of his work is therefore strictly verbal, and sales of his works are made only by way of an oral contract witnessed by a notary. 

Sehgal has had solo exhibitions at venues around the world, including Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2008), Magasin 3, Stockholm (2008), the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (2007-2008), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2007, 2006, 2005). 

Sehgal’s work is influenced by the two disparate academic disciplines in which he was trained: dance and political economy. In his work This Situation (2007), for instance, the performers strike choreographed poses lifted from a wide range of art historical sources but quickly break into wide-ranging dialogues (with each other as well as with the viewers of the piece) inspired by unattributed quotations that the performers recite from memory. Other works are more narrowly focused, and concerned with individual gestures or utterances. For his early work Instead of Allowing Some Thing to Rise Up to Your Face Dancing Bruce and Dan and Other Things (2000), Sehgal trains dancers to enact a series of movements taken from early video works by Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman while lying on the floor. In a similar move, his work Kiss (2002) consists of rotating pairs of dancers who bring kisses from famous works of art to life, from Auguste Rodin to Jeff Koons. In This Is New (2003) Sehgal instructs museum staff members to choose a headline from the day’s newspaper that they will recite to museum-goers as they buy tickets, check their coats, or otherwise engage with aspects of the museum’s operations where one would not expect to be ambushed by art. Here, as in all of Sehgal’s work, the barriers between art and life begin to blur.