300 Tons and Previous Projects features more than 80 of Santiago Sierra’s works from 1989 to 2004, several of which are published here for the first time. Sierra’s performances and installations are minimalist, task-oriented and incorporate numerical aspects—Person Paid to Have 30cm Line Tattooed on Them, Ten People Paid to Masturbate, Eight Combinations for a Door with Two Leaves.
The main focus of this book, with 220 black and white images throughout, is 300 Tons, the work Sierra created in 2004 for the Kunsthaus Bregenz Museum. Weights that added up to nearly 300 tons were used to tax the structural capacity of the Kunsthaus to its limit; only a restricted number of visitors were admitted at any given time. With this project, Sierra for the first time extends his artistic strategy to the entire structure of a building.