Santiago Sierra

Santiago Sierra (born 1966) is a Spanish artist, known for performance art and installation art. Much of his work deals with the topic of social inequities. While Sierra is critical of capitalism and the institutions which support it, he is also considered a successful artist.

Some of Sierra's most famous works have involved paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, paying Iraqi immigrants to wear protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyurethane foam as "free form" sculptures, blocking the entrance of Lisson Gallery with a metal wall on opening night, sealing the entrance of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, only to allow Spanish citizens in to see an exhibition of left over pieces of the previous year's exhibition.

He organised the installation of an anarchist black flag at the North Pole, which was placed on 14 April 2015. This was followed up with the installation of another flag at the South Pole on 14 December 2016.

In 2018 Sierra included a portrait of Carles Puigdemont into “Contemporary Spanish Political Prisoners” exhibition in Madrid. It was ordered to be removed on 23 February 2018.

In 2020 Sierra invited First Nations peoples from places colonised by the British empire to donate blood for an artwork called Union Flag; the Dark Mofo festival cancelled plans to show the artwork after a backlash led by Indigenous Australian artists.

Theme In explanation of his work, Sierra has said, "What I do is refuse to deny the principles that underlie the creation of an object of luxury: from the watchman who sits next to a Monet for eight hours a day, to the doorman who controls who comes in, to the source of the funds used to buy the collection. I try to include all this, and therein lies the little commotion about remuneration that my pieces have caused." More specific to his questioning of art institutions and capitalism, he said "At the Kunstwerke in Berlin they criticized me because I had people sitting for four hours a day, but they didn't realize that a little further up the hallway the guard spends eight hours a day on his feet...any of the people who make those criticisms have never worked in their lives; if they think it's a horror to sit hidden in a cardboard box for four hours, they don't know what work is...And of course extreme labor relations shed much more light on how the labor system actually works." Sierra has a displayed interest in visibility and invisibility. He explains the result of his work that pursues these interests, saying "The museum watchman I paid to live for 365 hours behind a wall at P.S.1 in New York told me that no one had ever been so interested in him and that he had never met so many people. I realized that hiding something is a very effective working technique. The forgotten people want to communicate..."