Thinkers In Residence: Adrien Sina, 2006

As Thinker in Residence Adrien Sina is considering issues of Performance, Politics, Ethics and Human Rights, in relation to historical and contemporary practices and ideas of representation, documentation and archiving.

For his Thinker programme Adrien Sina has developed a Study Room Guide in the form of a website which provides an historical overview of the development of the question of Human Rights and illustrates the historical and contemporary strategies undertaken by artists.

www.adrien-sina.net/ethics/

His work as Thinker will contribute to the development of the Live Art Development Agency's library of materials and inform the Agency's work for PSi #12: Performing Right in June 2006. A collaboration with Queen Mary, University of London PSi #12: Performing Rights will gather artists, activists and academics in a festival of creative and critical dialogues investigating the relationships between human rights and performance.

Adrien Sina trained as an architect at Paris-Villemin and the Architectural Association in London with Bernard Tschumi. His work on pre-Socratic philosophers has been essential for his art and theoretical practice. His work on homelessness in Los Angeles was the driving force of his theorising the missing links between cybercities, megacities, slumcities and homelesscities, concepts elaborated in discussions and published interviews with the philosopher Paul Virilio.

He has exhibited extensively, from Kyoto Future City Art Museum, 1994, to 'TransArchitectures 03' NAi-Rotterdam, 1998, and at various institutions in France. Among his curatorial projects are Fugitive Fluctuations for the Espace d'Art Yvonamor Palix in Paris in 1995, Fugitive Fluctuations mutation 2 (Ferme du Buisson Contemporary Art Centre, Noisiel 1996) and the performance-based Tragédies Charnelles, (Château de Pommery, Reims, 2000).  He conceived and edited special issues of La Mazarine on Tragédies Charnelles + Fluctuations Fugitives and Immanences Spatiales, the same year.

In 1995, Sina began a long-term series of projects engaged with issues of ethics, human rights and political representation. In particular 'Matrix of a Planetary Ethics' and the 'Planetary Parliament of Peoples and Minorities' used performances, video-installations, online actions and publications to propose a radical rethinking of juridical and institutional structures.

In 2003 he was advisor to Tate Liverpool for Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance. He has taught extensively in Europe and at the Pasadena Art Center and Sci-Arc in Los Angeles. He will be presenting pioneer futurist artist Valentine de Saint-Point at RoseLee Goldberg's Performa Biennale, New York, October 2005. Adrien Sina lives and works in Paris and London.