Thursday, December 11, 2025

Choreographed immateriality * Tino Sehgal


Through rigorously choreographed encounters that resist documentation, commodification, and even authorship in the traditional sense, he dismantles the art object with surgical precision. His work lives in the breath of a performer, in the passing moment of an exchange, in the choreography of presence and attention—disappearing as soon as it arrives. There is no product, no relic, no trace—only the memory of a gesture, a conversation, a gaze. This radical dematerialization is not a withdrawal but a confrontation: a refusal to participate in the rituals of accumulation that define the contemporary art economy. In spaces built to display and consume, he stages a disappearance. He weaponizes the immaterial against the machinery of value, making institutions complicit in their own undoing. By orchestrating experiences that vanish, he exposes the fragility of the structures that support the art world: market, archive, objecthood, spectacle. What remains is not a thing, but a shift—an ethical, philosophical, and phenomenological disturbance. In an era saturated with images and desperate for ownership, his work is a ghost in the system, haunting it from within with a quiet, uncompromising intensity.