Overview
AT THE RISK OF THE REAL (2015) expands on Cinthia Marcelle’s engagement with labour, industrial production and the reciprocity between art and daily life. As a proposal, the artist asks workers to perform routine tasks according to a specific choreography and set of conditions, imbuing those actions with newfound meaning, value and narrative.
During her visit to Sharjah, Marcelle was struck by the number of construction sites across the city. Among these was a site in the old, abandoned fishing village of Al Khan, where she saw piles of sand excavated for new development and workers manning wooden sieves to ready other piles for plaster construction. Spanning the interior footprint of an old house in Sharjah’s heritage area, AT THE RISK OF THE REAL is centred around a three-metre-high post-and-beam structure crowned with a system of sieves. As orchestrated by the artist, the sieves are activated sporadically by technicians unleashing a veil of dust reminiscent of sand’s separation from wind and the elements in the desert while obstructing the field of vision at ground level below.
This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 12
Artwork Images
AT THE RISK OF THE REAL
Cinthia Marcelle
2015
Wooden beams, sieves, sand
and tools, with regular activation,
22.5 × 17.7 × 3.2 m
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation
Courtesy Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, and the artist
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Marcelle, Cinthia
Working with video, photography and installation, Cinthia Marcelle choreographs interventions that often transform mundane or redundant gestures into poetic displays of exchange.