For this piece, situated in front of Limerick´s police department, permission was required from the local authorities with the intention of blocking the street on a Friday afternoon. The permission was given and the piece began to be installed as planned. However, the city´s police suddenly closed it down due to impact it could cause on the security and traffic of the city. After some negotiations, it was allowed to take place on a Sunday, starting at six o´clock in the morning, supposing that this would be the moment with least repercussions. This work basically consisted in the burning of twelve car wheels, placed perpendicularly to the transit, the remains of three stolen cars found in a junkyard, and the distribution of four rocks on the road, of the type used in the city to avoid the parking of vehicles.
Obstruction of a road with different objects, 2000
Glentworth Street. Limerick, Ireland. March 2000
Black and white photographic prints (poliptych)
73 x 56 cm
Edition of 10
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.
- Anna Boghiguian
- Candice Breitz
- Marco A. Castillo
- CATPC
- Alice Creischer
- Chto Delat
- Clegg & Guttmann
- Eugenio Dittborn
- Heinrich Dunst
- Anna Ehrenstein
- León Ferrari
- Peter Friedl
- Sophie Gogl
- Barbara Hammer
- Ramon Haze
- Hiwa K
- Simon Lehner
- Renzo Martens
- Chris Martin
- Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger
- Oswald Oberhuber
- Mario Pfeifer
- Dierk Schmidt
- Santiago Sierra
- Michael E. Smith
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Clemens von Wedemeyer
- Tobias Zielony