Welcome to This Situation Tino Sehgal's impersonal ethics (2014)

This article originally appeared in Dance Research Journal's special issue on “Dance in the Museum,” following the first installation of Tino Sehgal's This Situation in Montréal in 2013. Three interpreters (and, as such, embodied archivists), from that edition—Toni Pape, Noémie Solomon, and Alanna Thain—explore how choreographic and conspiratorial techniques activated by This Situation rework relations of inside and outside, participant and observer, subject and object through a collective bodily attending to the situation itself. These techniques, adapted from or affiliated with those of performance as the intricate negotiation of bodies, movement, and time in relation, make up the work's ecology of practices. Sehgal's work within the museum holds movements and relations to persistently make and unmake its forms, contents, and relations—as a way of making art contemporary via dance's propensity to always begin again. We term this commitment to rebeginning Sehgal's impersonal ethics.