Constructed Situations

Strategising with the team, followed by a trip to 798 to see three exhibitions at UCCA. Wang Keping's so-so wooden sculptures; Taryn Simon's chilling A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters which documents bloodlines through photographs and text (much of which appeared to be censored); and Tino Seghal's two installations or 'constructed situations' as he calls them...
The first is a pitch black room in which you grope your way into, slowly realising that there are people in there, chanting & dancing. The second a huge white hall with nothing in it except four people: a young boy, a twentysomething woman, an older man and an oldish woman. The boy asks you "What is progress?" and you start a conversation as you walk around the gallery, passing from one person to another. It reminded me of Turn Left Turn Right's You Once Said Yes which I took part in in Edinburgh two months ago. One was presented as 'art'', the other 'theatre'; one inside a museum, the other in multiple public spaces (but definitely not in a theatre); one you can sell to a collector (usually a museum), the other you can't. Ah, the vagaries of the art world...