Jill Magid

Jill Magid (born 1973) is an American conceptual artist, writer, and filmmaker. Magid’s performance-based practice "interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions that exist between institutions and individual agency.”

Magid has frequently worked by forming personal relationships with governmental systems of power, including police and intelligence agencies, questioning these structures of authority on a human level by embedding herself within them. Other projects intervene at contested sites of corporate control, bureaucratic process, and the law.

Life Magid was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1973. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received an MS in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She currently lives and works in New York with her husband Jonny Bauer and their two sons. She serves as an adjunct professor at The Cooper Union.

Exhibitions Magid's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, including Tate Modern, London (2009); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); San Francisco Art Institute (2016); Berkeley Museum of Art, California (2011); Tate Liverpool (2009); the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2005); Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York (2009); Gagosian Gallery, New York (2007); the Centre D'arte Santa Monica, Barcelona (2007); , The Netherlands (2008); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022), and the M-Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2023).

Magid is represented by LABOR, Mexico City.

Awards and residencies

Magid is an Associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and was a 2013–15 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Previously, Magid was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam from 2000–2. She has received various awards, including the Calder Prize 2017, the Basis Stipendium from Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands in 2006 and a Netherland-American Foundation Fellowship Fulbright Grant from 2001–2002.

She is also the author of four books, and her project The Barragán Archives is the subject of the book The Proposal, published by Sternberg Press.

Selected works Evidence Locker Evidence Locker was a 2004 collaboration with Liverpool's City Watch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council) – then England's largest citywide video surveillance system. Wearing a red trench coat for thirty-one days, Magid periodically contacted on-duty police to train their public cameras on her. Sometimes, the surveillants located her on their own.

City Watch stores CCTV footage for only thirty-one days "unless requested as evidence"; requested footage, in turn, is kept for seven years in a digital "Evidence Locker" on the organization's main computer. Despite her collaboration with the organization, Magid could only obtain access to her footage by formally submitting thirty-one Subject Access Request Forms, detailing the time and nature of the evidentiary incidents. Building upon her implicit intimacy with the CCTV observers, Magid filled out these legal documents as if writing letters to a lover. The collected letters form her 2004 book, One Cycle of Memory in the City of L.

After filing the forms, Magid received over eleven hours of CCTV recordings, constituting her own personal evidence locker. The artist edited this footage into a number of videos, including Final Tour (2004), which comprises a series of time-lapse sequences of the artist motorcycling through the city at sunset, backed by Georges Delerue's score from Le Mépris. In Trust (2004), a CCTV operator communicates with Magid via mobile phone, guiding the artist – eyes closed – through the city's public spaces.

As a whole, Evidence Locker contributes to contemporary debates around public surveillance by giving a nuanced, focused take on the "emotional and philosophical relationship between ‘protective' institutions […] and individual identity."

The Spy Project In 2005, Magid was commissioned by the Dutch secret service (AIVD) to make a work for its new headquarters, as per the law's stipulation that "a portion of the budget for the new building be spent on an art commission." The organization solicited the artist to help improve its public persona by providing "‘the AIVD with a human face.'"

Magid spent the following three years meeting with eighteen willing employees in non-descript public places, from restaurants and bars to airport meeting points. Named after the article that protects personal data, Article 12 never entirely disclosed the identities of Magid's contacts, but nonetheless inverted "the surveillance duties of the agency" by publicly displaying materials associated with its employees.

Failed States On January 21, 2010, a man attempted to enter the Texas State Capitol to speak with a Senator's aide. Immediately upon exiting the building, he fired six shots into the sky. Magid, coincidentally, was on a trip to research the history of snipers in Austin; her eyewitness account of the shooting aired on several media outlets.

The motivations of the young shooter, Fausto Cardenas, remain unknown. He was charged with perpetrating a terrorist threat to the government, but the trial date for his case was continuously delayed. Fausto accepted a plea bargain, in August 2011, "ultimately silencing himself."

Magid responded strongly to "the symbolic gesture of six shots into the sky, the fateful setting, the silence that refuses to ground [Fausto] in political rhetoric or personal instability." Goethe's epic was originally written as a "closet drama," "a play to be read rather than performed". In Magid's hands, the gallery transformed into a "stage to be read," with language, sculpture, video and image creating an intertextual weave between stories and events, individuals and publics, actions and aftermaths.

Auto Portrait Pending is exhibited as an incomplete form of Magid's self-portrait. A contract containing three sections (a corporate contract, artist's preamble and a private beneficiary contract), a ring box and the unset gold ring make up its existing parts. The beneficiary contract allows for ownership of "the artist (in symbolic terms) until her death, after which her ashes will be transformed into a jewel to be put in the ring on permanent display." At the beginning of the beneficiary contract it is stated that the funeral and artwork are to be completely separate. The beneficiary who is unknown at this time must be a collector or institution with a substantial collection where the piece will remain in permanent display. In her own words, "The beneficiary is usually the loved one. The husbands gets the wife, the wife the husband, etcetera. I specify the beneficiary as a collector."

"Representation is exchanged for reality. It is a kind of Faustian pact (a recurring motif for the artist, in fact) with Magid bartering for eternal existence in the form of a carefully curated gemstone commodity, offering her own body as an artwork in the making, and in so doing tying herself in very strange relationship with an unknown Beneficiary: technically she becomes their property-to-be."

The Barragán Archives From 2013 through 2016, Magid explored the contested legacy of the late Mexican architect Luis Barragán. While Barragán's personal archive and the vast majority of his architecture are located in Mexico, his professional archive is owned by the Swiss corporation Vitra, under the auspices of the not-for-profit Barragan Foundation. The foundation firmly controls the rights to Barragán's name and work, and has kept the archive closed to the public. Magid’s project asks “what can happen to an artist’s legacy when a corporation owns and controls the rights to his work.” Through a series of objects, installations, performances, and a feature film, it explores the "intersection of the psychological with the judicial, national identity and repatriation, international property rights and copyright law, authorship and ownership."

The project has been the subject of a number of exhibitions. These include “Women with Sombrero” at Art In General, New York (2013) and Yvon Lambert, Paris (2014), “The Proposal” at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland and the San Francisco Art Institute

The Proposal (Film, 2018) Magid’s first feature film, The Proposal (83 min, 2018), was commissioned by Laura Poitras of Field of Vision, who also served as executive producer. The film explores Magid's relationship to Luis Barragán, and builds on her work stemming from his archive. The narrative starts with her in her studio in New York and then moves to Barragán's home, recreating aspects of his life, and delving deeper into his relationships, connections and personal moments from his life. The film unpacks a narrative exploring "...forms of power, public access, and copyright that construct artistic legacy", as Magid explores the split of Barragán's archive - a personal verse a professional one- upon his death. The professional archive (along with the rights to the Barragán name) was purchased by Rolf Fehlbaum, the chairman of Vitra a Swiss furniture company, as an engagement present for his at the time fiancée Federica Zanco "in lieu of a ring", as Magid repeats through the film. Since the purchase of the archive this portion has not been exhibited. receiving numerous awards. The film is distributed in the US and Canada by Oscilloscope Films, and the Centre Pompidou. It was a New York Times critics’ pick, and was reviewed in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among others.

Books

One Cycle of Memory in the City of L (2004) comprises the thirty-one Subject Access Request Forms Magid filed to obtain access to CCTV footage from Evidence Locker, her 2004 collaboration with Liverpool's City Watch. These forms ask for the time and nature of the incidents in question, which Magid supplied along with expressions of affection for their implicit recipients. In the artist's work, an intimacy can form between a pedestrian and her surveillants, and a bureaucratic document can testify to that relationship.

Part of The Spy Project, Becoming Tarden (2010) is a non-fiction novel that emerged from Magid's interviews with eighteen agents of the Dutch secret service (AIVD). Following Magid's submission of a draft, in 2008, the organization censored forty percent of the contents, from compromising information to the artist's personal descriptions and recollections. AIVD conceded to allow Magid to exhibit the uncensored report – only once – "‘as a visual work of art.'" Following its secure display in 2009/10 at the Tate Modern, the Dutch government assumed ownership of the manuscript.

"Ms. Magid […] seems motivated by an urge to infiltrate and personalize, if not sexualize, the anonymous social and technological systems that surround us. She pursues an idiosyncratic kind of body art descended from artists like Vito Acconci, Adrian Piper and Sophie Calle."