Jill Magid

Jill Magid (born 1973) is an American conceptual artist, writer, and filmmaker.

Magid’s performance-based practice "interrogates structures of power on an intimate level, exploring the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions that exist between institutions and individual agency.”

Magid has frequently worked by forming personal relationships with governmental systems of power, including police and intelligence agencies, questioning these structures of authority on a human level by embedding herself within them.

Other projects intervene at contested sites of corporate control, bureaucratic process, and the law.

Jill Magid was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1973.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received an MS in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She currently lives and works in New York with her husband Jonny Bauer and their two sons.

She serves as an adjunct professor at The Cooper Union.

Previously, Magid was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam from 2000–2.

Evidence Locker was a 2004 collaboration with Liverpool's City Watch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council) – then England's largest citywide video surveillance system.

Wearing a red trench coat for thirty-one days, Magid periodically contacted on-duty police to train their public cameras on her.

Sometimes, the surveillants located her on their own.

City Watch stores CCTV footage for only thirty-one days "unless requested as evidence"; requested footage, in turn, is kept for seven years in a digital "Evidence Locker" on the organization's main computer.

Despite her collaboration with the organization, Magid could only obtain access to her footage by formally submitting thirty-one Subject Access Request Forms, detailing the time and nature of the evidentiary incidents.

Building upon her implicit intimacy with the CCTV observers, Magid filled out these legal documents as if writing letters to a lover.

The collected letters form her 2004 book, One Cycle of Memory in the City of L.

After filing the forms, Magid received over eleven hours of CCTV recordings, constituting her own personal evidence locker.

The artist edited this footage into a number of videos, including Final Tour (2004), which comprises a series of time-lapse sequences of the artist motorcycling through the city at sunset, backed by Georges Delerue's score from Le Mépris.

In Trust (2004), a CCTV operator communicates with Magid via mobile phone, guiding the artist – eyes closed – through the city's public spaces.

As a whole, Evidence Locker contributes to contemporary debates around public surveillance by giving a nuanced, focused take on the "emotional and philosophical relationship between ‘protective' institutions […] and individual identity."

In 2005, Magid was commissioned by the Dutch secret service (AIVD) to make a work for its new headquarters, as per the law's stipulation that "a portion of the budget for the new building be spent on an art commission."

The organization solicited the artist to help improve its public persona by providing "‘the AIVD with a human face.'"

Magid spent the following three years meeting with eighteen willing employees in non-descript public places, from restaurants and bars to airport meeting points.

AIVD restricted the artist from using recording equipment, so she collected her contacts' personal data in handwritten notes, which informed her later series of neons, sculptures and paper works.

Magid also drafted a report of her meetings, amassing the details of individual contacts into a collective persona that she referred to as "The Organization."

The first exhibition of the project, Article 12, opened at "Stroom" Den Haag, The Netherlands in April 2008 – the same month AIVD took residence in its new headquarters.

The show also marked the official end of the artist's commission.

Named after the article that protects personal data, Article 12 never entirely disclosed the identities of Magid's contacts, but nonetheless inverted "the surveillance duties of the agency" by publicly displaying materials associated with its employees.

Magid invited AIVD personnel to review the exhibition a day before the opening; the agents returned, during its run, to confiscate several works.

A draft of Magid's report, in turn, was delivered to the artist with redactions of "any information that might compromise her sources' identities," as well as "some of the artist's descriptions of her own thoughts and feelings."

Magid's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, including Tate Modern, London (2009); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); San Francisco Art Institute (2016); Berkeley Museum of Art, California (2011); Tate Liverpool (2009); the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2005); Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York (2009); Gagosian Gallery, New York (2007); the Centre D'arte Santa Monica, Barcelona (2007); Stroom Den Haag, The Netherlands (2008); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2022), and the M-Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2023).

Magid is represented by LABOR, Mexico City.

The artist "protested against the censorship of her own memories," prompting AIVD to suggest that she "‘present the manuscript as a visual work of art in a one-time-only exhibition, after which it would become the property of the Dutch government and not be published.'" Magid's 2009/10 exhibition at Tate Modern, Authority to Remove, marked the fulfillment of this request: the uncensored report sat securely behind glass.

In its penultimate state, the project thus expressed "what it means to have a secret but not the autonomy to share it."

AIVD entered Tate Modern, in 2010, to permanently confiscate Magid's uncensored manuscript.

A paperback of the redacted version, Becoming Tarden, was published in 2010.

On January 21, 2010, a man attempted to enter the Texas State Capitol to speak with a Senator's aide.

Magid is an Associate of the Art, Design and the Public Domain program at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and was a 2013–15 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

She has received various awards, including the Calder Prize 2017, the Basis Stipendium from Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands in 2006 and a Netherland-American Foundation Fellowship Fulbright Grant from 2001–2002.

She is also the author of four books, and her project The Barragán Archives is the subject of the book The Proposal, published by Sternberg Press.