Santiago Sierra: Dedicated to the Workers & Unemployed

1 Feb-3 Mar 2012

Overview

A major survey exhibition of video work and new work by Santiago Sierra. The exhibition includes a timetabled cycle of narrative based films shown alongside a curated selection of Sierra’s shorter and less linear works. Recently completed NO, GLOBAL TOUR is a new film which documents the manufacture and transportation through various world cities of two monumental sculptures in the form of the word "NO". Unchanged both in its form and immediate meaning – the sculptures gradually assume a complex semantic load during a journey full of eventualities, accidents and unexpected events. Death Counter, a Sierra piece comprised of an LED display counting annual number of human deaths worldwide since the beginning of the year will be mounted outside the gallery. Sierra represents the commercial conditions of our existence that we aren’t comfortable confronting. In doing so he has created a body of work that rescues and renews the expressive power of minimalism and conceptualism, with a political charge that encourages reflection on the classical problems of Western art while denouncing our current situation.