ExhibitionOctober 8, 2024
Santiago Sierra: 1502 personas cara a la pared (1502 Persons Facing The Wall)
The CA2M museum presents the first solo exhibition in a Madrid institution of the artist Santiago Sierra (Madrid, 1966); the show, curated by Alexis Callado, will be on view until February 2, 2025. This exhibition compiles and analyzes one of the resources most present in Santiago Sierra’s practice throughout his artistic career and invites us to reflect on issues such as immigration, exploitation, exclusion, colonial devastation, or war.
The exhibition evidences the artist's ability to insert a sense of urgency into the formal languages of minimalism, conceptual art, and performance art of the 1960s and 1970s to unveil the perverse networks of contemporary power. This power exacerbates human alienation, transforms the world into a place of violence, injustice, and death, and crosses the entire territory until it penetrates each body.
Beyond a first reading of political content, 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 is inscribed and proposes a global view of the world we inhabit. More than the scope of his critique or the formal resources he uses to raise it, he reflects on that way of playing with the conditions of production and expectation through photographs and videos recorded in black and white.
The works selected for this exhibition show that the contradictions of capitalism are also effective in the space of art, avoiding any rhetoric and any mystifying resource and thus producing an inescapable awareness of the real. Sierra says, “There is little room here for ambiguity or the viewer’s imagination.” There is not much to interpret. The viewer feels instead questioned, confronted crudely with his condition of exploiter through the gaze.
The exhibition evidences the artist's ability to insert a sense of urgency into the formal languages of minimalism, conceptual art, and performance art of the 1960s and 1970s to unveil the perverse networks of contemporary power. This power exacerbates human alienation, transforms the world into a place of violence, injustice, and death, and crosses the entire territory until it penetrates each body.
Beyond a first reading of political content, 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 is inscribed and proposes a global view of the world we inhabit. More than the scope of his critique or the formal resources he uses to raise it, he reflects on that way of playing with the conditions of production and expectation through photographs and videos recorded in black and white.
The works selected for this exhibition show that the contradictions of capitalism are also effective in the space of art, avoiding any rhetoric and any mystifying resource and thus producing an inescapable awareness of the real. Sierra says, “There is little room here for ambiguity or the viewer’s imagination.” There is not much to interpret. The viewer feels instead questioned, confronted crudely with his condition of exploiter through the gaze.
