Santiago Sierra | Santiago Sierra's Talk

Night 2, May 19th
After graduating in Fine Arts at Madrid's Complutense University, Santiago Sierra completed his artistic training in Hamburg, where he studied under professors F. E. Walter, S. Brown and B. J. Blume. His beginnings are linked to alternative art circuits in the capital of Spain —El Ojo Atómico, Espacio P— although he would go on to develop much of his career in Mexico (1995– 2006) and Italy (2006–10). His work has always exerted a great influence on artistic literature and criticism.
Sierra's oeuvre strives to reveal the perverse networks of power that inspire the alienation and exploitation of workers, the injustice of labour relations, the unequal distribution of wealth produced by capitalism, the deviance of work and money, and racial discrimination in a world scored with unidirectional (south-north) migratory flows.
Revisiting and refiguring certain strategies characterising the Minimalist, Conceptual and Performance Art of the 1960s and 70s, Sierra interrupts flows of capital and goods (Obstruction of Freeway With a Truck’s Trailer, 1998; Person Obstructing a Line of Containers, 2009); he hires labourers to reveal their precarious circumstances (20 Workers in a Ship’s Hold, 2001); he explores the mechanisms of racial segregation derived from economic inequalities (Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, 2002; Economical Study of The Skin of Caracans, 2006); and refutes the stories that legitimate a democracy based on state violence (Veterans of the Wars of Cambodia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Afghanistan an Iraq Facing The Wall, 2010-12; Los encargados, 2012).
He has exhibited in important museums, art centers and galleries around the world, such as the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art ARS 01 (Helsinki), Kunst Werke (Berlin), Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria), MoMA PS1 (New York), Artium (Vitoria) or PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea (Milan). His work is represented by important galleries such as Helga de Alvear (Madrid, Spain), Prometeo Gallery Ida Pisani (Milan, Italy), Labor (Mexico) and KOW (Berlin, Germany).

Summit Two, 2024
Chthonic Realism: Summoning Ghosts and Monsters

Reality is Chthonic in the sense that it is not entirely revealed in any relations. For a realist, the world is not only the world-for-us, reduced to human access, but rather there is always a surplus. Accordingly, Chthonic Realism is a term that attempts to take into account the existence of the world-in-itself, apart from any relation, and, certainly, the world-without-us, the world of Inhumans, as opposed to the world-for-us, a world merely reduced to human correlation.* The term Chthonic also brings to mind the word Cthulhu. In various cultural and mythological contexts, “chthonic” is often used to describe deities, spirits, or forces that are related to the underworld, or the afterlife. Summoned from a dimension outside of time and space beyond the limits of human understanding, Cthulhu – a tentacular Lovecraftian cosmic monster – has appeared in many different texts playing different roles from an otherworldly monster in horror novels to a metonymic figure for speculative and metaphysical in contemporary philosophy. This creature is an inhuman entity coming from the darkness of reality – somewhere beyond human finitude – that threatens our world and shakes the pillars of human understanding.Chthonic Realism: Summoning Ghosts and Monsters explores the concepts of horror, speculation, the unknown, and the future. How things of the past can teach humans to gain a better understanding of reality. What happens when contemporary artists summon the ghosts of antiquity or monsters beyond the boundaries of time and space? And how things of the past can beckon us through the obscurity of the unknowable and towards a multitude of Futures?