Miami, March 16, 2018 — Miami Dade College’s (MDC) Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) will present This Situation, a work by the acclaimed British-German artist Tino Sehgal. This Situation offers visitors a unique and constantly evolving live experience that radically expands ideas of what art can be. This Situation will be on view in the MOAD galleries from April 7 to April 29.
This Situation is part of MOAD’s Living Together, an exciting cross-disciplinary series of programs that will galvanize Miami audiences with thoughtful and challenging performances and exhibitions that draw from art, music, theater, politics, and poetry. Spread across the city at a wide array of venues, the series features performances, exhibitions, film and video screenings, readings, talks, and workshops that reflect the cultural, social, and political realities of how we live now. Living Together seeks to find new ways to think about civic space and citizenship, to instigate actions and conversations that may help to reimagine cities and lives.
Sehgal creates works that are constructed situations which question the traditional subject-object relationship of visual art. He takes language, singing, dancing, and other modes of behavior as his artistic material, often generating immersive artworks that are felt more than they are seen. Interaction between the visitor and the work takes a central position, and focus is placed on ephemeral gestures and the nuances of the audience’s experience, rather than any material objects. In Sehgal’s works, “interpreters” act out various episodes that may comprise conversation or choreography, often involving the visitors. In an early work, Kiss (2002), for example, two dancers in a gallery move in ways that evoke a number of amorous scenes familiar from the history of art.
This Situation, originally created in 2007, enables a conversation that throws into question our self-image as a society and our roles as individuals within that society. Six interpreters enact a discussion in the form of a contemporary salon. They cultivate the visitors’ participation in the dialogue that follows, helping to generate a conversational practice that is continually renewed and potentially endless.
Sehgal was born in London in 1976. He lives and works in Berlin. He studied dance and economics, and has developed an artistic practice that plays out in the art world and its institutions—including the museum, galleries, art fairs, and private collections—at the same time it operates as a critique of this milieu. Interested in the idea of visual art as a component and a microcosm of larger economic systems, Sehgal’s work reflects on art’s position vis-à-vis the production and circulation of commodities. He reconsiders and disrupts art’s participation in this system by creating artistic meaning and value with ephemeral interactions and situations instead of physical objects. Extending these ideas, he does not allow his work to be documented through photography, film, or video, which might themselves transform the time-based experience into an object and a potential commodity. Yet far from pretending that his art exists in an escapist world exempt from economic exchange, the artist does allow his works to be bought and sold, and they may be reenacted in various sites and under disparate conditions. Walking this fine line, Sehgal creates the possibility of a reevaluation of art’s relationship to economic necessities, and helps generate new ways of thinking about how art produces value and meaning.
Perhaps most importantly, his work produces a new kind of viewer. As Claire Barliant and Nat Trotman have written, with Sehgal’s art, “a visitor is no longer only a passive spectator, but one who bears a responsibility to shape and, at times, to contribute to the actual realization of the piece.” The audience’s experience of a work by Sehgal is necessarily extremely personal and subjective, and it may change dramatically with successive visits.
Sehgal’s work has been widely shown internationally. In 2010, the Guggenheim Museum devoted its entire rotunda to Sehgal’s work This Progress (2006). In 2012, his work occupied the Tate Turbine Hall in London. Other solo presentations have included the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2004); Fundao Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2005); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (all 2006); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2006–07); MMK Frankfurt (2007); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2007–2012); Trussardi Foundation, Villa Reale, Milan; Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthall (both 2008); Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal; IMMA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (both 2013); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (both 2014); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015–16); and the Fondation Beyeler (2017). He won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2013.
Living Together will take place at various sites across the greater Miami area now through September 2018 and will include works by 17 of the most acclaimed national and international artists, art collectives, musicians, and writers. Events in the series will be produced by MOAD in collaboration with a range of other Miami institutions, and most events will be free and open to the public. The curators of Living Together are Rina Carvajal, Executive Director and Chief Curator of MOAD, and Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator based in New York.
Living Together is made possible by the generous support of Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council; the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council.
WHAT: Tino Sehgal: This Situation
WHEN: April 7–29, 2018
Wednesday, Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays 1– 6 p.m.; Saturdays 1– 8 p.m.
WHERE: Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design, Freedom Tower, 600 Biscayne Boulevard, Miami, FL 33132
Museum admission: $12 adults; $8 seniors and military; $5 students ( ages 13–17) and college students (with valid ID); free for MOAD members, MDC students, faculty, and staff, and children 12 and under
For updates and a full schedule of events, please visit http://www.mdcmoad.org/
Press Contacts: MOAD Scott T. Smith, Marketing and membership coordinator, 305 237-7741, ssmith9@mdc.edu; JWI PR—Jessica Wade Pfeffer, 305-804-8424, jessica@jwipr.com; or Juliana Gutierrez, 305-991-4259, juliana@jwipr.com.