The Animation of Contemporary Subjectivity in Tino Sehgal’sAnn Lee

Abstract

Tino Sehgal's performance Ann Lee was first presented in 2011 at the Manchester Art Gallery as part of the Manchester International Festival's 11 Rooms. It has since been performed in several gallery and museum spaces, including the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York (2013), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2015) and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2016). In my experience of the work at the Manchester Art Gallery in 2011, the title character, played by a twelve-year-old girl, entered the white, cube-like space in which I waited with a dozen more people: 'Hello. Nice to see you. My name is Ann Lee', she uttered, sucking out of the room like a vacuum any sound made by the spectators. The effect of her utterance and her demeanour were entirely strange. A blue-eyed girl of no more than twelve years old had commanded everybody's attention with a simple greeting. It was not what she had said, but the manner in which she had said it. I was looking at a young girl, but I could barely recognise her as human. It did not feel as though she was acting, which is what made this feel stranger. The colouring of her voice, its lack of subtext, the neutrality of her body gestures, all made her seem like a foreign creature. She looked us in the eye with no reservations, without the shyness usually accompanying a girl her age. She was humble, but her humility was that of a mature, knowing person. I remember taking a step back, leaning with my back against the wall in need of more distance to observe and understand what I wasencountering. Yet, there was no room -physically or temporally -afforded to me for this until after the performance ended. For the time being, I was arrested by her gaze.