Connecting through Collecting: 20 years of art from Latin America at the University of Essex, Exhibition Catalogue.

This chapter explores Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper series (2006–present) as enactments of an artistic practice that wants to be directly inserted in reality. First, I trace the genealogy of Arte de Conducta as a reaction against the Anglo-European category of “Performance” art, which anchors her work to a cultural tradition outside of the En…[Read more]

This paper explores how Santiago Sierra’s artistic practice undoes the stable identification of the viewer by placing him or her in the double position of master and slave, employer and employee, at the same time. I posit that Sierra’s works double the spectator’s position of power and make visible the existence in the present of past hiera…[Read more]

This paper explores important formal paradoxes in Francis Alÿs’ early artistic practice.

This paper studies the uses and abuses of the term “Precarity” in contemporary art.

This paper closely analyses Santiago Sierra’s understanding of the relationship between work and freedom in contemporary society. By focusing on a series of works where the artist hired someone to perform a specific activity (often involving labour or a contractual working agreement), this essay explores the location(s) of work in Sierra’s art…[Read more]

This paper addresses the construction of time in Francis Alÿs’ Rehearsal (1999-2004) and Tania Bruguera’s Untitled (Place, Year) (2000-present) series. These suites posit a model of temporality that questions two foundational premises of the modernist understanding of time, the futuristic regime of historicity, and the categorical differentiation…[Read more]

Francis Alÿs’s, Santiago Sierra’s, and Tania Bruguera´s artistic practices occupy an “in between” space, lodged between Western constructions and non-Western counter-narratives, active as a site for transcultural dialogues. Born in Belgium, Francis Alÿs moved to Mexico City in the late 1980s. Similarly, in the late 1990s, the Spanish artist Sa…[Read more]

Francis Alÿs, Santiago Sierra y Tania Bruguera se caracterizan, entre otros factores, por una extrema movilidad geográfica. Estos tres artistas han logrado articular un lenguaje artístico que, aunque derivado de vivencias personales, les ha permitido intervenir en múltiples y disímiles regiones geográficas, desde Corea del Norte hasta La Haban…[Read more]