Santiago Sierra:
Person Remunerated for a Period of 360 Consecutive Hours

September 17 - November 2000

(Long Island City, NY, August 17, 2000) -- P.S.1 is pleased to present Person Remunerated for a Period of 360 Consecutive Hours a major new work by young Mexico City-based artist Santiago Sierra. Born in Madrid in 1966, his work spans performance, installation, photography, and video.

Sierra’s harsh and poetic statements focus on the economic and power relations of today’s post-colonial diasporic world. They reveal the pain and division that contemporary conditions engender and foster. Central to his work is a concern with the repetitive routines and the exchange value of labor. As a result, Sierra’s work presents absurd and monotonous activities in the gallery setting. Functioning on both a literal and a symbolic level, Sierra’s socially engaged work follows the tradition of Arte Povera and the process artists from the 1970s.

Sierra’s past works have included the disassembly of a truck piece by piece only to re-assemble it in a gallery. In another work, the artist ignited a gallery with gasoline on its inaugural night. Sierra has hired laborers to perform fruitless tasks such as pushing enormous cement blocks around a gallery, and simply sitting in a cardboard box throughout an entire working day.

For P.S.1, the artist has designed a project that is a living metaphor for confinement, incarceration, and the negotiation that occurs around and across borders. A brick wall diagonally cuts across P.S.1’s 2nd floor gallery. Behind the wall is a person who has been hired by the artist to live there for 15 days, 24 hours a day (September 17 – October 1, 2000) without having any further instructions or duties. P.S.1 staff slides food under a narrow opening at the base of the wall. The person generally can not be seen by the audience but may relate to the "other side" in any way he/she chooses through the small opening in the wall.

Person Remunerated for a Period of 360 Consecutive Hours is curated by P.S.1 Senior Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and is supported in part by the Mexican Cultural Institute, New York.

This project is organized in conjunction with other events commemorating the 190th Anniversary of Mexican Independence.

This year, exhibitions of Santiago Sierra’s work will take place at Kunst Werke, Berlin, Germany (opens September 30); The Pusan Metropolitan Museum of Art, Korea (opens October 3); San Juan Warehouse Project, Puerto Rico (opens October 10); The Havana Biennial, Cuba (opens November 8); Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (opens December).