Tino Sehgal’s Live Kiss Draws a Crowd at AMA Venezia During Biennale Week
Venice’s opening days for the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia brought no shortage of spectacle, but one of the most talked-about rooms was not in the official exhibition at all. At Laurent Asscher’s AMA Venezia, the collector’s foundation in La Serenissima, roughly 1,600 people passed through on Monday, filling the space before the press preview and turning the venue into a concentrated snapshot of the city’s art-world traffic.
The draw was Tino Sehgal’s Kiss (Clean Version), a live work performed by a nude couple reenacting famous kisses from art history. The piece unfolded over the course of the day, with 10 dancers arriving at 10 a.m., rotating every two hours, and finishing at 8:30 p.m. Sehgal’s rules are central to the work: it remains active while the space is open to the public, and photographs are not permitted.
Asscher’s foundation also displayed trophy works by Ed Ruscha, Christopher Wool, and Jenny Saville, alongside younger artists Joseph Yaeger and Sang Woo Kim, but Sehgal’s performance commanded the most attention. Visitors described the experience as both awkward and compelling, a live encounter that made the room feel unusually charged.
Asscher, who is based in Monaco and Belgium, said he had acquired a different Sehgal work three years ago at a charity auction at the Opera de Paris. He liked it, but realized it was not the right fit for the foundation he was still planning. When he later met the artist, they decided on Kiss (Clean Version), which is based on Sehgal’s earlier The Kiss.
For Asscher, the appeal was immediate. He said he had finally understood what a Tino Sehgal work is: not an object to be owned in the usual sense, but a feeling that exists only in the moment of performance. In Venice, where hundreds of artists, collectors, dealers, and curators are competing for attention across official and unofficial events, that kind of presence can still cut through the noise.
