In the absence of documentation. Remembering Tino Sehgal's constructed situations

Museum practices of collecting and conservation have a long history of documenting artworks as a form of "materialised memory". On the sale of his work, the artist Tino Sehgal (London, 1976), however, does not allow for any form of visual documentation or material traces. Instead, knowledge of how to perform his pieces is intended to travel from person to person, from body to body in the form of narratives, movements, and through rehearsals. How can this work survive in contexts that seem to be so heavily dependent on written and visual documents? What are the challenges presented by these works, and how do museums respond to these challenges? Informed by empirical research into museums’ strategies of acquiring Sehgal’s work, this essay will argue that different notions of memory are brought to the fore through these collecting and conservation practices, thereby challenging existing documentation strategies and practices of remembrance