Tino Sehgal at Blenheim Park & Gardens

Following a year of extensive confinement indoors during the Covid-19 pandemic, Blenheim Art Foundation hosted a major solo exhibition by Tino Sehgal taking place entirely outdoors. This was the first exhibition in the Foundation’s programme designed specifically for the Park and Gardens.

Tino Sehgal (b. 1976) is known for artworks composed exclusively using the human body, voice, and social interaction. His artistic practice focuses on the fleeting gestures and subtleties of social encounters, with participation and open exchange as the subjects of value, rather than material objects. For this project, Sehgal presented a complex, roaming choreography imagined for Blenheim, involving more than 30 participants.

Conceived as a series of scenes rather than works with fixed locations, the exhibition moved fluidly throughout the Park and Gardens like a game of encounters, responding to specific conditions such as the number of visitors, the location or the weather. Akin to a swarm or flock, the group of participants – the majority of whom were local residents cast specially for this project – gathered and dispersed in a fluid and porous choreography, enacting moments of connection with visitors and their surroundings.

This relationship of movement to context was informed by the landscape architecture of Capability Brown. The fluid response to specific locations and vistas, and the adaptation to visitors’ movements, extended the ways in which Brown’s designs were originally inspired by the ‘capability’ of the existing environment and landscape, their innate potential for transformation and elevation.