Santiago Sierra : Art & Engagement at CAC Malaga

Saturday, 03 June 2006 11:30

Malaga, Spain - CAC Málaga, the centre run by Málaga City Council and devoted to contemporary art, presents Santiago Sierra’s first solo exhibition at a Spanish art centre or museum. Sierra is the only Spaniard in the hundred most influential artists in the world according to Capital magazine.  The show features a total of 1,354 black and white photographs, seven videos, a psychophony, jewels and other works illustrating the creative process behind the last four interventions in this artist’s professional career:  The Corridor in the House of the People (Bucharest, Rumania, 2005), 245 m3 (Stommeln, Germany, 2006), The Punished (Frankfurt, Germany, 2006) and Jewellery Collection (Madrid, Spain, 2006).  The exhibition, directed by Fernando Francés and curated by Helena Juncosa, is wholly produced by CAC Málaga itself.

The most controversial artist of the day leaves no one indifferent.  His courage leads him to confront such issues as prostitution, immigration, poverty, racism, violence and war in places where their meaning takes on singular nuances.

Under the title 245 m3, Santiago Sierra turned a synagogue in the town of Pulheim (Stommeln, Germany) into a gas chamber in March this year. To do so, he used plastic tubes to pump gas from the exhaust pipes of six cars placed outside the building through the windows.  Visitors to this extraordinary installation had to wear gas masks to enter, and had to be escorted by a firefighter.  Before entering, they had to sign a disclaimer making clear they were aware that the room was full of carbon monoxide.  Due to the controversy it caused, the exhibition finally closed early, on 21 March instead of the scheduled 30 April.  Sierra’s declared intention in creating this installation was “to honor the memory of the countless Jews who were brutally murdered” in what he called “a work against the trivialisation of our memory of the Holocaust”.

The Punished is the title of a work Sierra produced in Frankfurt days after his installation in the synagogue.  In the action, organized under the aegis of Fine Art Fair Frankfurt, various people were made to stand with their faces to the wall in nine different parts of the German city, in submissive attitude and complete silence.  Once more, German feelings of guilt were present in this work, which can be seen as a continuation of the controversial gas chamber in the Stommeln synagogue.

In February 2006, Santiago Sierra presented the Jewellery Collection he had designed with Chus Burés: gold and diamond necklaces and bracelets inscribed with the words “Gold Trafficking Kills” and “Diamond Trafficking Kills”.

Now, Sierra has produced a subtle installation at CAC Málaga.  In it, the pre-Constitutional coat of arms that crowns the main entrance to the Wholesale Market will be lit up at night in a warning call to the Spanish people not to forget the past and recent history, which also contains its fair share of shadowy events.

Taking 1960s-style minimalism as his starting point, Sierra seeks to show how space, the body and human relations are dominated by market forces. Santiago Sierra (Madrid, 1966) took his degree in Fine Art from the University of Madrid in Alcalá de Henares.  His works have been shown at museums, art centers and galleries all over the world, including ARS 01 (Helsinki), Kunstwerke (Berlin) and P.S.1 (New York).

Sierra’s art, loaded from the onset with social and political critique, attempts to show just how absurd established power relations are and to highlight the problems that the capitalist economy causes to ordinary people.  All his interventions embody an exercise in reflection in which artistic production plays a strategic role.  The exhibition ends 13 august 2006.

Visit CAC Malaga at : http://www.cacmalaga.org/00-ig.htm