SANTIAGO SIERRA. 1502 PEOPLE FACING THE WALL

Curated by Alexis Callado.

The Museo CA2M is presenting the first solo show by the artist Santiago Sierra in a Madrid institution. This exhibition consists of a compilation and analysis of one of the most common resources in the practice of Santiago Sierra (Madrid, Spain, 1966) throughout his entire artistic career: pictures of people facing the wall, like inverse ‘portraits’ in which the subject’s identity is negated or dissolved in anomie. A survey with both historical and more recent works has been created based on this theme, which encourages spectators to reflect on issues like immigration, exploitation, exclusion, colonial devastation and war.

The show reveals the artist’s ability to insert a sense of urgency into the formal languages of minimalism, conceptual art and performance from the 1960s and 1970s to uncover the perverse networks of contemporary power, a power that exacerbates human alienation and transforms the world into a place of violence, injustice and death which permeates the entire territory until penetrating into each individual body.

Beyond an initial political interpretation, Sierra’s work uses procedures that question the violence of the code of relations that dominates the institution of art and the productive system in which it falls, and he instead suggests a global view of the world we inhabit. More than the scope of his critique or the formal resources he uses to offer it, he uses black-and-white photographs and videos to reflect on that way of playing with the conditions and expectations of production. One example is his work for the 2003 Venice Biennale, where he transformed the Spanish pavilion into a manifesto against borders by asking visitors for documents accrediting their Spanish nationality (their ‘papers’) to enter the premises.

The works chosen for this exhibition show that the contradictions of capitalism also apply in the space of art, avoiding any rhetoric and mystifying resources and thus producing an inescapable awareness of what is real. As Sierra himself says, ‘there is little leeway here for the spectator’s ambiguity or imagination’. There is not much to interpret. The spectator instead feels challenged, starkly confronted with their status as exploiters via their gaze.

SANTIAGO SIERRA

After earning a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, he furthered his artistic training in Hamburg, where he studied with professors F. E. Walter, S. Brown and J. Blume. Early on, he was associated with alternative artistic circuits in Madrid—El Ojo Atómico Espacio P—although he has spent much of his career in Mexico (1995–2006) and Italy (2006–2010). His work has been very influential on literature and art criticism and strives to reveal the perverse networks of power that lead to worker alienation and exploitation, injustice and violence, the wealth disparities caused by capitalism, the misalignment between work and money and racial discrimination in a world of one-way (south-to-north) migratory movements. By revisiting and reinterpreting certain strategies that characterised the minimalistic, conceptual and performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, Sierra interrupts the flows of capital and goods (Obstruction of a Freeway with a Trucks Trailer[AS1] , 1998; Person Obstructing a Line of Containers, 2009), hires workers to reveal their precarious circumstances (20 Workers in a Ship’s Hold, 2001), explores the mechanisms of racial segregation stemming from economic inequalities (Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to their Skin Colour, 2001; Economic Study on the Skin of Caracans[AS2] , 2006) and refutes the stories that legitimise democracy based on state-sponsored violence (Veterans of the Wars of Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq Facing the Corner, 2010-2012; Those in Charge[AS3] , 2012).

He has shown his works at important museums, art centres and galleries all over the world, like the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma ARS 01 (Helsinki), the Kunst-Werke (Berlin), the Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria), MoMA’s PS1 (New York), Artium (Vitoria) and PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporánea (Milan). His works are also represented by major galleries like Helga de Alvear (Madrid, Spain), Prometeogallery (Milan, Italy), Labor (Mexico) and KOW (Berlin, Germany).

ALEXIS CALLADO

He holds a degree in Art History from the University of Havana. His curatorial practice includes individual exhibitions with Carlos Pazos (La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana), as well as group shows (Ante nuestros ojos, Loop Festival, Barcelona; Culto Digestivo, Conarte, Monterrey[AS4] ) and collaborative projects, like Lab Latino, Bienal XVIII de Arte Paiz, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. He actively promotes exchanges among the art scenes in Spain and Latin America. He chose, coordinated and produced publications of graphic works, photographs and sculptural objects for the Madrid-based company Arte y Naturaleza. He has organised artistic projects in Sweden, Spain, France, Guatemala, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Cuba. He collaborates with publications, museums, associations and centres specialising in contemporary art, and he is a member of the Transatlantic Network and a co-founder of The Curatorial Bureau.