Throughout my go to to Ilê Sartuzi’s present exhibition, ‘Trick’, at Museu de Arte Contemporânea in São Paulo, an alarm went off, blaring for what felt like an eternity. As if to say my innocence, I remained seated quietly in one of many galleries, solely to rapidly understand that the disruption was, actually, a piece from the collection ‘Propositions for Museum Safety Techniques’ (2023); likewise the unusual voice I had heard upon my arrival yelling, ‘Flip me off!’ Certainly, the whole exhibition is peppered with moments like this. Close by, Watchman (2023–25) contains a CCTV digicam spinning quickly within the centre of an empty room; alongside hangs a monitor displaying the captured footage. The utterly blurred photographs that end result from this stressed digital ‘eye’ immediate us to mirror on the paranoid notion of complete surveillance and the disorienting idea of the panopticon as a mechanism of self-discipline and management.
The present’s underlying irony is that no alarm is triggered when, in his two-channel video set up Sleight of Hand (2023–24), Sartuzi steals a seventeenth century silver coin from the British Museum’s numismatic part. The depicted theft was found by the museum a lot later, by the media, revealing the issues within the establishment’s purportedly sturdy surveillance programs. The footage lasts a number of seconds: from the second the artist removes the coin from the show cupboard in room 68 of the British Museum, changing it with a reproduction he created, till he deposits the unique within the establishment’s donation field. Some won’t even classify it as a theft, because the object was merely relocated and didn’t depart the museum’s premises.
Sartuzi’s regulatory information can also be on show in Sleight of Hand (Letters) (2024), exactly argued and politely cooperative correspondences with the British Museum’s Authorized Service, displayed in a room adjoining to the video. The piece undoubtedly factors to a legacy of institutional critique and Brazilian conceptual artwork, evoking works comparable to Cildo Meireles’s Ocasião (Event, 1974/2004) – an set up that performs with the idiom ‘alternative makes a thief’ – whereas additionally resonating with modern tasks like Glicéria Tupinambá’s Okará Assojaba (2024), introduced within the Brazilian pavilion ultimately yr’s Venice Biennale, wherein the artist corresponds with European museums about their possession of Indigenous mantles.
Highlighting the traditionally normalized and imperialist heists underwritten by main western artwork collections, together with the British Museum, Sartuzi’s Sleight of Hand is a brilliantly witty but virtually imperceptible gesture. As such, his work is in dialogue with Francis Alÿs’s When Religion Strikes Mountains (2002) – a commentary on the Latin American political disaster which noticed him invite 500 volunteers to maneuver a dune in Peru a number of centimetres utilizing solely shovels, impressed by the motto ‘most effort, minimal end result’. Sartuzi equally stresses the dialectic of such a dynamic: a number of months of meticulous planning that culminates in nothing greater than a slight shift. A small silver coin positioned in a donation field mobilizes one of many largest cultural establishments on this planet, ignites in depth media consideration and questions centuries-old requirements. Sartuzi’s work is already historic, carving out its place within the panorama of latest conceptual artwork by a mere sleight of hand.
Primary picture: Ilê Sartuzi, Sleight of Hand, 2023–24, video nonetheless. Courtesy: the artist
