Tino Sehgal – This success/This failure

You will meet no paintings, sculptures or videoes. No signs or printed catalogues. Instead Tino Sehgal has called upon a series of different people, museum guards, children, dancers and singers.

Tino Sehgal's works thrive best with participation; no humans, no artwork. Rules are not always clear to the eye. There are actions, dialogues and reactions. As a showdown with the traditional relation between artwork and viewer and what we understand as an exhibition, Tino Sehgal transforms art into a ground breaking interaction between the audience and his enterpreters via performative strategies.

After larger exhibitions at Tate Modern in London and Palais de Tokyo in Paris Tino Sehgal is introduced in Denmark for the first time with a big solo exhibition at Kunsten in Aalborg. At the same time Kunsten acquires a work for the collection as the first museum in Denmark. There are no written rules on how the works are to be performed, and they must not be neither photographed nor documented. The outcomes of the works is are based on human memory. The artists' rejection of all documentation of his works can be seen as political, especially the fact that he rejects all unnecessary use of nature ressources in a time, where human production of things is no longer about survival in nature but about self promotion in modern society via material goods. Tino Sehgals asks the question:

"What can we create with just our selves without things and technology?"

It is in essential matter to the artist to make us rethink, what we understand as art, and have us reflect on the defining role of the museum as dealer of cultural value and as temple of objects. Tine Sehgal seeks to both ask questions on the function of art and define new possibilities on how we understand artistical value - both aesthetically, culturally and economically.

About the Exhibition

The exhibition at Kunsten will feature a total of four works. The central work, This success/This failure, 2006, has been acquired for Kunsten’s permanent collection and will be realised in close collaboration with more than 1,500 local children who will take turns at constructing the work with about 25 children at a time. Visitors to the museum will become involved in a playful universe ruled by children.

Three other works will also be shown. Together they will provide a broader impression of Tino Sehgal’s oeuvre: Kiss, 2002, This is propaganda, 2002, and This is new, 2003. The works involve dancers, singers and the museum’s hosts.

About the Artist

Tino Sehgal lives and works in Berlin. He studied Political Economy, Choreography and Dance at the Humboldt Universitet of Berlin and Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen. When Tino Sehgal represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2005 he was the youngest artist ever to have done so. He has since had solo exhibitions at major museums and exhibition venues all over the world. These include: the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Tate Modern in London and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In 2018 Ny Carlsbergfondet donated This success/This failure to Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg.

The exhibiton is part of Kunsten pARTicipate - an exhibition series focusing on how contemporary art develops into the direct and involving meeting with the audience.