White Room: Sven Sachsalber – Hands

White Columns is pleased to present Hands, the first solo project by the Italian, New York-based artist Sven Sachsalber.

Hands is a durational performance/installation made in collaboration with the artist’s father and presented by White Columns in association with Performa 15 – the city wide, bi-annual festival of new performance work.

As with much of his previous work Hands is durational in both nature and form. In one of White Columns’ ‘White Room’ galleries the artist and his father (on his first visit to the United States) will attempt to complete a 13,200 piece jigsaw puzzle depicting The Creation of Adam, a detail from Michelangelo’s mural in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Given the complexity of the puzzle it is impossible to determine if, or when, the performance will end. Son and father will be present in the gallery, working on the puzzle during public hours, as well as privately in the evenings. Given the symbolism of Michelangelo’s image, Hands is as much a work about the relationship between Sven and his father as it is about the absurdity of assembling a 13,200 piece puzzle in front of an audience: Hands will be a public ‘spectacle’ of an unusually subdued kind.

Sven Sachsalber (b. Schlanders, Italy, 1987) works between performance, installation and video. Duration is a recurring device in his work, which often employs the tragic-comic to engage with complex emotional and psychological territories. His work has been exhibited internationally, including a recent, and widely reported project at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (November 2014) in which the artist searched – literally – for a needle in a haystack.

For more information contact: info@whitecolumns.org