Enduring Liveness: An Imaginary Retrospective of Tino Sehgal’s Constructed Situations

The key functions of a museum are collecting, preserving and presenting, and informing the public about culture and art. Performance art has been notoriously difficult for museums to handle. Despite the ‘easy’ presentation, the non-materiality of the artform challenges a museum’s conventional methods and practices. Artist Tino Sehgal added to these problems by insisting that his performances, or better his ‘constructed situations’, absolutely cannot be documented in any way or form. While several books and some catalogues have been written about his work, none of them include images of actual performances. This exhibition catalogue is part of Monoskop Exhibition Library @ Seoul Mediacity Biennial 2018