(untitled) (2000)

What would the world look like if...

Thirteen years after its premiere, Boris Charmatz dances (untitled) (2000), the last work that the British-German artist and Turner Prize candidate Tino Sehgal created for theatre before he moved to visual art. The performance seems to sum up this transition between the two art forms. As in a museum of dance, 20th-century dance is exhibited in a theatrical way. Choreography and its view of the physical are placed in a new aesthetic sequence. Sehgal explains the medium of dance in a very personal way and interprets the different styles of the 20th century. However, he goes beyond narrating a history of dance and opens up the questions even more. Can we organise society in the same way as the creation of choreography, through a constant change of movements, the simultaneity of production and the interruption of an action. What would the world look like if the values and systems of society originated in dance? By performing the work again thirteen years after its premiere, new qualities surface and it offers us new perspectives for its interpretation.

• The British-German artist Tino Sehgal studied dance and political economy. Since he no longer works in theatres, he creates ‘live situations’ in museums and galleries that change and develop according to the visitors. Consequently, they unintentionally play a role in the structures of his work. Sehgal has work in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Tate in London and the MoMA in New York. He was nominated for the Turner Prize for the work he created for Documenta in 2012.