Destroyed Word - Santiago Sierra - Melbourne Festival

DESTROYED WORD.

“The artist’s work courts shock. There is a poetics as well as a politics to Sierra’s work.” The Guardian (UK)

Since 2010, Sierra has travelled the world, building giant letters from materials of local importance, and then publicly and dramatically destroying them. From Iceland to Ireland, Germany to Papua New Guinea, Sierra has enacted his alphabetical annihilation, and now he comes to Melbourne to demolish the tenth and final letter of his work.

In the forecourt of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the last character of DESTROYED WORD will be constructed and then set aflame. With this towering alphabetical inferno, the final secret of Sierra’s work will be delivered. Together the ten letters spell a mystery word, to be revealed with the burning of the final letter -­‐ a unifying theme to tie together this orgy of construction and demolition.

Each dramatic eradication has been captured on film, with the burning of the final letter, the construction and deletion of each letter of DESTROYED WORD will be on exhibit in the National Gallery of Victoria – the individual acts joining to form an immense work that revels in our collective fascination with creation and destruction.

Sierra Santiago is the anarchist of the artistic world, renowned for his left wing approach to his work and the capitalism that surrounds it. Some of Sierra’s most famous works included paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polytherane foam as “free form” sculptures, blocking the entrance to Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year’s exhibition. Another of his well-­‐known projects is a room of mud in Hanover, Germany, commemorating the job-­‐creation measure origin of the Maschsee. In 2006, he provoked controversy with his installation, “245 cubic metres”, a gas chamber created inside a former synagogue in Pulheim, Germany.

This epic visual arts project from one of the most thought provoking artists of our time ends its trail of destruction in Melbourne.

 Venue:  Destruction, ACCA, forecourt . 111 Sturt Street, Melbourne

Dates:   Wed 10 Oct at 8.15pm

Venue: Exhibition, Level 3, NGV International. 180 St. Kilda Road.

Dates: Wed 17 – Sat 27 Oct, 10am – 5pm, closed Tue

Tickets: FREE

Event Details:

ACCA (111 Sturt Street, Melbourne ) & NGV (180 St. Kilda Road)

10 Oct to 27 Oct 2012