Tino Sehgal fills Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with storytellers

Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian:

According to Sehgal the work is about the relationship between the individual and the mass: “It is about what it means to belong to a group, which is also quite a personal question for me.” The Turbine Hall was intriguing, he said, because “it is such an unusual space for a museum, since museums were invented to train visitors in polite behaviour. But the Turbine Hall is different: it is made to make people gather together and puts them in a joyful, bodily, unrestricted space.”

Several hundred participants are involved in the project. They were recruited through networks of friends and acquaintances, and rehearsed by Sehgal and his producer, Asad Raza. The stories they tell visitors are based on a set of open-ended questions asked by Sehgal, such as: “When did you feel a sense of belonging?” and “When did you experience a sense of arrival?” The participants work in four-hour shifts, with breaks, and are paid, according to the Tate curator Jessica Morgan, between £8 and £9 per hour. Most are fitting the work at Tate around other professional commitments, from posts at universities to freelance photography.

According to Raza the work “shows London to itself; it is a more accurate picture of London than something that is cooked up by one particular person”. On Monday morning though, none of the participants was black: according to Dercon, “we have complete diversity but we didn't select them as if we were casting a sitcom”.

More here.