As a performance artist this was my first experience in a durational work. It was incredible how dancing and chanting while interacting with the public asked of me as a performer. I was able to use my meditative and breath practices to get me through the work. The work has no traces, nothing written down and cannot be photographed. - Geraldine Balcazar
Presented by Kaldor Public Art Projects at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney February 2014.
Due to the nature of Tino Sehgal’s work, this Project can only be discussed orally. With the exception of a small number of press clippings and photographs of associated programs, archival material from Project 29 is not available online.
John Kaldor speaks of this incredible artist and his work here https://kaldorartprojects.org.au/projects/project-29-tino-sehgal/
Project Summary from Kaldor Public Art Projects website.
Spontaneous and contagiously uplifting, controversial artist Tino Sehgal’s This is so contemporary, 2004, enlivened the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in summer 2014. The work featured a cast of twenty-six interpreters, who directly engaged visitors at the gallery’s entrance through dance, voice and movement.
Born in London, Sehgal studied political economy at Berlin’s Humboldt University and dance at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, later apprenticing with French artist/choreographer Xavier Le Roy. “What interested me in dance,” Sehgal explained, “was it was a way of producing something and nothing at the same time”.
Sehgal has since pioneered a radical way of orchestrating “constructed situations”, featuring rigorously trained and rehearsed “interpreters”, employing dance, voice and movement in museum and gallery spaces.
The youngest artist to represent Germany at the Venice Biennale, participating in 2005, when he presented This is so contemporary, and again in 2013, Sehgal was awarded the 55th Venice Biennale’s prestigious Golden Lion in 2013. That same year, Sehgal presented This is new, 2003, in the 27th Kaldor project, 13 Rooms.
Sehgal’s works have become renowned for subverting the relationship between viewers and art, demanding a new way of engaging with art and ideas around art, politics, production and ownership. Distinct from both performance art and theatre, Sehgal’s situations demand a different kind of beholder; one who cannot be a passive spectator, but bears a responsibility to contribute to the realisation of the actual piece.
Not permitting his work to be photographed or filmed, Sehgal leaves no material trace, creating something at once valuable yet intangible that “seems to revel in its own contradictions”, as Anne Midgette observed in the New York Times. “It is created with extreme, even obsessive, rigour, yet it is subject to change, as the only record exists in the minds of those who see it”.
Tino Sehgal's This is so contemporary was re-presented in 2019 as part of the exhibition Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.