Tino Sehgal

This is the second of three solo exhibitions by artist Tino Sehgal taking place between 2005 and 2007 at the ICA.

This series of shows is designed to provide audiences with a unique opportunity to follow the development of the artist over a three-year period. The first exhibition provided an introduction to the artist’s practice and featured both his earliest and most recent pieces. For this second exhibition, Sehgal presents an exclusive new work, which imaginatively explores and encompasses all the exhibition spaces at the ICA.

A background in choreography and political economy has played a fundamental role in his development of an artistic practice, which does not produce tangible objects or any form of material trace. Sehgal designs situations that take the form of fleeting gestures based on movement and the spoken word, with one or several people acting out a set of instructions over the duration of an exhibition.

Sehgal fulfils the conventions of a visual artwork without physically producing anything: assembling meaning through his direction of people rather than creating physical objects. Over his career, Sehgal has worked with a variety of interpreters on his pieces, including museum guards, singers, children, academics and socially disadvantaged communities, to create highly provisional pieces of art that challenge traditional museological contexts. The human voice, language, movement and interaction are the artistic materials with which Sehgal stakes out a radical position within the field of the visual arts.

Sehgal views visual art as being completely interrelated with society, functioning along identical economic conditions, namely the production and exchange of goods and commodities. He is interested in challenging these conditions by creating artworks through a transformation of actions rather than solid materials, producing meaning in effect through a transitory and temporary situation. Throughout his work Sehgal explores social processes, conventions and the allocation of roles, thus questioning the fundamental elements of not only art practice, but also the art system: idea, originality, producer, viewer, owner and market value.

Tino Sehgal was born in London in 1976 and currently lives in Berlin.

The exhibition has been kindly supported by The Felix Trust for Art, London and the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e.V., Stuttgart.

TINO SEHGAL IN CONVERSATION WITH DR. SIMON GLENDINNING

Monday 6 February, 7pm Tino Sehgal will be in conversation with Dr. Simon Glendinning, Fellow in European Philosophy, London School of Economics, and the author of On Being With Others: Heidegger-Derrida-Wittgenstein (Routledge 1998) and General Editor of The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy (EUP, 1999). Dr. Glendinning has also written widely on the nature of animal life, on perception, and metaphilosophy and is currently writing a book on the European inheritance of phenomenology. He was also one the Interpreters of Tino Sehgal’s work This Objective Of That Object (2004), presented at the ICA in 2005. Pressetext

Tino Sehgal