Tate Modern has announced that British-born, Berlin-based young artist Tino Sehgal has been commissioned to create an artwork for the Turbine Hall project next year, as part of the London 2012 Festival and the finale of the Cultural Olympiad. Sehgal who studied political economics and dance in Germany becomes a phenomenon in art, having exhibitions all over Europe and the United States during a decade. Ahead of Sehgal’s commission work to be unveiled in July 2012, Tate Modern offered a four day workshop (20th – 23rd August) with Sehgal, which any ages and experiences could join in, so I applied for participation. The workshop taking place in Tate Modern comprised open discussions about a theme initiated by the artist and physical activities or games in relation to the theme. Since I am concerned about whether the workshop could relate to his Turbine Hall project which details have not been disclosed yet, this writing will illustrate why I got a distinct impression of Seghal’s artistic productions and approach, rather than reviewing my experience of the workshop.

The first time I learnt his name was at an exhibition Move: Choreographing You at the Hayward gallery in Southbank Centre last year, which invited visitors to physically experience installations and sculptures created by visual artists and choreographers who have contributed to contemporary aesthetics of art and performance. It was overdue to be aware of Seghal’s work since his works have been critically acclaimed since his first exhibition in 2000. One of the reasons I had heard of him belatedly was because he had presented works in the context of art institutions – museums or galleries. However, he does not produce material objects as works of art, but rather focuses on human voices, movements and lived experiences, which he refers to as “living sculptures”. He creates “constructed situations” in which visitors encounter actors whose are partly improvised but primarily governed by a set of rules Seghal establishes. For example, Kiss (2002) is a performance work in which two performers continuously enact kiss scenes from famous works of art. In This is New (2003), a museum attendant read out a headline from that day’s newspaper. In his latest solo exhibition, This Progress (2010) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, visitors were invited to the museum’s iconic spiral ramp in which all the paintings were taken out for the first time. Instead of seeing artworks, the visitors are arranged to walk up the ramp while coming across and dialoguing with trained people from a child to a senior person.

Seghal’s performance-based works, not object-oriented works recall happening/performance artists in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, and Allan Kaprow. Nevertheless, what differentiates him from the precursors is his objection to be called performance art. His practices qualify as visual art, by embracing traditions of art world: presenting a work during opening hours of a museum and being able to be bought and sold through a verbal contract with Sehgal. However, at the same time, he defies the conventional context of art institutions, by setting up complex and picky rules devised for his commissions: no photography, no recording and no catalogue are permitted. Seghal insists that ephemerality and irreproduciblity are exclusive natures of human embodied experience which he believes are destroyed in mediated forms. I found out a contradiction in his artistic approach since he refuses the conventional context of performance/theatre but embraces the orthodox notion of performance in terms of its ontological nature. His insistence on immediacy and disappearance of human embodied experience but also its ability to be sustained and to be owned reflects his political and philosophical statement. Relying on his recent artistic approach, I can assume that his upcoming work for Turbine Hall would include audiences’ active engagement in the work. Sehgal’s new work will be shown on 17th July until 28 October next year.