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Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, 2002

Project Space, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria

The Kunsthalle Wien contacted thirty workers who had been recommended to them. They sought persons of various skin colors -from very light to very dark- to be arranged side-by-side. The persons were contacted by telephone and asked where they came from. From this, their skin color was deduced. As soon as a sufficient number of people for the desired spectrum of shades were thought to be available, the persons involved were called together. The first 27 persons to arrive were arranged in their underwear with their faces to the wall. Those involved who had the appropriate mixture of white and color turned up when the action had already ended. This can be seen in the result: the in-between shades are missing.

Santiago Sierra, Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, Project Space, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, September 2002, C-Prints (Diptych), 150 x 220 cm each
Santiago Sierra, Hiring and Arrangement of 30 Workers in Relation to Their Skin Color, Project Space, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria, September 2002, C-Prints (Diptych), 150 x 220 cm each

C-Prints (Diptych), 150 x 220 cm each

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Santiago Sierra

Santiago Sierra's oeuvre stands out from the art history of the past 30 years like a massive black monolith. The Spaniard, who was born in 1966 and also lived in Latin America, knows like no other how to use the established forms and rules of contemporary art to give the violence and injustice of Western modernity a face - a face that is our own. The formal language of minimalism, in its distanced, cool way, is particularly suited to being short-circuited with the abstract economic and institutional apparatuses that bind people into the dehumanized conditions of production, migration, (self-)exploitation, and stigmatization. Those conditions, in other words, that guarantee the privileges of most of the viewers to whom Sierra's work addresses itself in the art world. Not everyone likes that. Sierra is the living shadow in the repressed bad conscience of power and money, with which people rule over people. His work has been honored institutionally many times, and in 2003 he represented Spain at the Venice Biennale.



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