Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London

Santiago Sierra, "89 Huicholes" (2006). 84 black-and-white photographs, each 12 x 9 in.

February 2009 Field Guide

Roni Horn

"Where in the World?"

Paper Cuts: 200 Years of Black Paper Dolls

Gedi Sibony

Charles Darwin

Dan Graham

"The Dirty Hands"

Yayoi Kusama

Year of Fashion

Isabelle Cornaro

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Sophie Ristelhueber

Glenn Brown

The Face of Our Time

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Mexico City-based Spaniard Santiago Sierra’s performance projects refer to labor, social inequality, and capitalist exploitation, but they mirror exploitation instead of simply denouncing it — thereby exposing our complicity. Sierra started out, in the early 1990s, with actions that took the banal conceptual-action rubric and kicked it up a notch through outsourcing. He even paid his participants for their trouble, with cash or hard narcotics. In 160 CM Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000), four drug-addicted Spanish prostitutes allowed their backs to be inked in exchange for a syringe of heroin. A few months later, the artist paid 10 Cubans $20 each to masturbate on video. In the ensuing years, illegal immigrants stood in a Paris gallery, Italian anarchists were made to listen to the pope’s mass, and poison gas was pumped into a German synagogue. This month, Sierra will create two new works that engage with the port that Magasin 3 abuts, as well as presenting 21 Anthropometric Modules Made of Human Faeces by the People of Sulabh International, India, 2005-2006, which, yes, is exactly that.

magasin3.com

"Santiago Sierra" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.