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18/2/2009

Santiago Sierra

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm

curated by Elisabeth Millqvist

The disturbing quality of Sierra’s works lies not in the gap between me and the Other but in the unbearable recognising of another human being.
Curator Elisabeth Millqvist, ur katalogen.

Santiago Sierra makes the main exhibition at Magasin 3 this spring. Since the 1990s, Santiago Sierra has worked to create socially critical actions. He has represented Spain at the Venice Biennale where he bricked up the entrance to the Spanish pavilion, he has worked with drug addicts and prostitutes, and has created an income index related to skin color. Sierra’s works leave no one unmoved. By means of formal presentations or staged events, he places focus on and reminds us of societal conditions. The actual events, their traces and their documentation constitute the works. The artist uses the titles of the works to describe precisely what we are seeing and thereby invites us to look beyond the form or the action being performed.

Santiago Sierra will focus on the location of Magasin 3 in the free port when creating two new works. Transport and trade, exemplified by the port area, are important subjects in his artistic practice and will be the focus of the exhibition. The artist will show his most comprehensively challenging sculptural work to date, a piece from 2006-2007, and will extend the exhibition to billboards around the city.

Santiago Sierra has been creating socially critical actions since the mid 1990s. When he represented Spain at the Venice Biennale he bricked up the entrance to the Spanish pavilion. He has worked with drug addicts and prostitutes, and has created an income index related to skin color. By means of formal works or staged events, he exposes and calls attention to social conditions. In these works, people become objects that can be painted, used, and organized according to different hierarchies. Often seen with their backs to the viewer, they become anonymous examples of how human dignity is an economic privilege. The artist uses the titles of the works to describe precisely what we are seeing and thereby invites us to look beyond the form or the action being performed.

Santiago Sierra was born in Spain in 1966. This exhibition is the first extensive presentation of the artist in Sweden. His work can be seen concurrently at Political/Minimal, Kunstwerke, Berlin, and The Living Currency, Tate Modern, London amongst others. In London he is also showing the new work Death Counter. Sierra has exhibited extensively at venues such as the Venice Biennale (2003, 2001); ARS 01, KIASMA, Helsinki (2001); KunstWerke, Berlin and PS1, New York (2000).

Thursday March 5 at 7 pm. Conversation between Lisa Rosendahl and Elisabeth Millqvist. Location: the lobby at Magasin 3
An in depth conversation about Santiago Sierra’s artistry between Lisa Rosendahl, curator and director of the Baltic Art Center in Visby and exhibition curator Elisabeth Millqvist. Lisa Rosendahl has worked with Sierra numerous times.Santiago Sierra is an artist who leaves no one unmoved, and he is seen both as provocative and controversial. The conversation deals with the issues that comes up when working with Sierra.

Lisa Rosendahl is the director of the Baltic Art Center in Visby. As a curator she has worked with Santiago Sierra in the production of GROUP OF PERSONS FACING THE WALL AND PERSON FACING INTO A CORNER (2002) and POLYURETHANE SPRAYED ON THE BACKS OF 10 WORKERS (2004). Together with Daniel McClean she is co-curator for the project Exchange: Sites of Negotiation in Contemporary Art including Sierra’s site specific work DEATH COUNTER (2009) for Hiscox Insurance Group in London.

Wednesday March 18 at 7 pm. Program evening, the Sierra exhibition will be open 5 pm-7 pm. Lecture by Stellan Vinthagen in the lobby at Magasin 3.
Lecture by Stellan Vinthagen: Creativity as recistance; on the research about recistance and the recistance’s practical creativity

Ph D Stellan Vinthagen, senior lecturer in sociology and recistance activist in several recistance movements. Stellan teaches and does research on recistance techniques, tectics and strategies within social movements, action groups and among individuals in Sweden and the so called Third world. He is co-editor for the publication ‘Motstånd’ (released in April 2009 on Liber), and one of the founders to the global research network Resistance Studies (www.resistancestudies.org) and action project Ship to Gaza.


Friday May 8. Lecture at 4 pm. Location: the lobby at Magasin 3
Lecture by Daniel McClean: Santiago Sierra’s ‘Death Counter’
”My lecture will examine Santiago Sierra’s project, ‘Death Counter’, Hiscox Insurers, London (1 January 2009 to 31 December 2009), which I have co-curated with Lisa Rosendahl as part of the exhibition ‘Offer and Exchange’. Death Counter is an LED counter registering the total number of human deaths worldwide of any cause over the course of one year.
I will consider in my lecture how Sierra’s project reflects upon different systems for producing value within 21st century capitalist society, connecting and differentiating the ‘aesthetic economy’ of the art market with the wider capitalist economy. I will also examine the legal moment in this project and other projects by Sierra. In Death Counter, Sierra deliberately uses the legal contract as a mechanism for producing the artwork. It is clear that contracts form the kernel of the capitalist system, enabling the ‘free’ forms of exchange of goods, labour and property, without which capitalism would not be able to function.”

Daniel McClean is a lawyer specialising in art law, intellectual property law and medial law, practising at Withers LLP (London and New York). He acts for leading international artists and galleries including recently, the Haunch of Venison gallery against the UK Customs authorities. He has edited two publications, ‘The Trials of Art’ (2007) and ‘Dear Images: Art, Copyright and Culture’ (2002). He is also an independent curator. His most recent exhibitions is ‘Offer and exchange: sites of negotiation in contemporary art’ (2007-2008), co-curated with Lisa Rosendahl and produced by Electra.

Press images and information
For log-in access, please contact Tove Schalin, exhibition coordinator/press contact schalin@magasin3.com

Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall
Frihamnen - Stockholm
Thursday 11-7 pm, Friday-Sunday 11-5 pm

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