PRESENTATION: Santiago Sierra-The Maelstrom

Santiago Sierra is a contemporary conceptual and performance Spanish artist whose oeuvre continues to be widely recognised and exhibited in major art institutions around the world. Known for his provocative and politically charged artwork that often addresses issues of social and economic inequality, labour exploitation, and human rights. Sierra’s work spans a variety of mediums, including installation, video, performance, and photography, and often involves the use of controversial materials such as blood, human hair, and excrement.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: KOW Berlin Archive

Santiago Sierra’s oeuvre stands out from the art history of the past 30 years like a massive black monolith. He was born in 1966 and also lived in Latin America, heknows 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. Santiago Sierra returns to Berlin with an exhibition of his new project “The Maelstrom”. Black people are being subjugated in it in ways we don’t want to see, because Europe speaks with a nastiness we don’t want to hear, and because this is arguably Sierra’s most aesthetically pleasing work yet—and in this thematic context, we also might not want to be pleased. In short: there are several conflicts that Sierra’s exhibition evokes. And then there’s a flag, drenched in blood. “The Maelström” (2024): Gambia, Africa is a walled-in compound. Men are put up against the wall. Hands behind your heads. Hands behind your backs. On your knees! One after the other, they go through the motions of a universally familiar choreography of obedience and submission. Their master? The camera.  Transplanted into an abstract visual space, the same black bodies return on a digital stage before a white backdrop like the graphic elements of an increasingly ornamental, dehumanized composition, forming patterns, grids, circles. The action in the picture is almost drowned out by the voice of Europe. It is the voice of Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, the second-most important person in Brussels. In 2022, it became publicly known that Borrell had given a speech in which he had called Europe a garden and the rest of the world a jungle that needed to be brought under control. It was a textbook-ready specimen of racism and colonialism, an instant classic of the genre. Sierra replays it in a loop, again and again; at first you don’t believe your ears, then you get sick to your stomach. Sierra’s project is carefully calculated. His film and accompanying photographic works with which the exhibition opens on the gallery’s ground floor were created in collaboration with players of the Gambian football team Tallinding United, who performed for “The Maelstrom”. Among the sources of inspiration for the choreographic arrangements were the principles of Busby Berkeley, the influential Hollywood choreographer and director of musical films who established the geometric-modern play with bodies in large numbers as a widely popular form of entertainment; around the same time, the Nazis, too, whipped their crowds into visual shape. A very different inspiration were the pictures coming from El Salvador: the staged abasement of young men made to surrender their bodies to a brutal carceral regime by the tens of thousands made headlines around the world in 2022. The Israeli military recently applied the same image politics when it published pictures of Palestinian prisoners in their underwear. Santiago Sierra’s new work unmasks the postcolonial Western rhetoric. It points to the continuity of the European pattern of really existing colonialism and racism. The Maelstrom eventually congeals into exactly the kind of menacing, apocalyptic Black mass that strikes such fear into the hearts of Europeans like Borrell and that anarchists like Sierra welcome as an uncontainable geopolitical biopower from below. In a side room that visitors are asked to enter singly is the “National Flag Of Spain Submerged In Blood” (2021), a Spanish flag made of sailcloth was soaked in blood donated by anonymous volunteers and was put on display for the first time at the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation on October 12th, 2021. The same blood was used to print the “National Coat of Arms of Spain Stamped with Blood” (2022). The blood comes from territories that had been colonized by the Spanish Empire and from present day provinces of Spain representing those that existed during the Spanish Republic, forcefully conquered by the Francoist Catholic National Army during the Civil War, which imposed the monarchical flag that is still in use to this day.

Photo: Santiago Sierra, National Flag Of Spain Submerged In Blood, 2021, Silk, blood, 135 x 133 x 100 cm (display), 111 x 2 x 81 cm (flag), © Santiago Sierra, Courtesy the artist and KOW

Info: KOW Berlin, Lindenstraße  35, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 9/3-13/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://kow-berlin.com/