Santiago Sierra

Santiago Sierra was born in 1966. He studied art in Madrid and then specialised in Hamburg, where he began producing installations from a minimalist and conceptual matrix. Defined black and white shapes realised with an extreme economy of means combine with a desire to stage actions that silently tear apart the veil of hypocrisy with which the capitalist West tries to hide its contradictions. 

For his performances, Sierra involves non-EU workers, drug addicts and prostitutes, trying to make their physical presence within the artistic context essential and at the same time critical. The artist hires the weakest and most exploited people, part of a neo-liberal system that sees human bodies as expendable and disposable commodities on a par with other raw materials, to do absurd, tiring, useless work, to create a short-circuit between the museum white cube - ideally a place of culture and therefore inclusiveness - and the global economy - relying on abuse, exploitation and prevarication.