Tino Sehgal
born 1976 in Londonlives and works in Berlin
German-British artist Tino Sehgal, who studied choreography and economics in Berlin and Essen, presented his ephemeral piece This is so contemporary at the 51st Venice Biennial. Executed by three actors dressed as exhibition attendants, they greet visitors to the German pavilion by singing the title of the piece. Endlessly repeating the sentence, they dance around the room and the visitors. The piece is activated only in the moment when the viewers enter the pavilion.
The work is characteristic of Sehgal’s constructed, artistic situations that consist of fleeting gestures, movements or spoken words. Sehgal utterly rejects any form of documentation like photographs or videos that could show his work retrospectively. However, his pieces can endure in the sense that they can be repeated.