Jill Magid

Jill Magid lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, United States.

Artist, writer, and filmmaker Jill Magid adopts a critical stance towards systems of authority. She inserts herself into structures of control, becoming a protagonist within them and generating an interconnected body of work—spanning sculpture, installation, performance, books, and moving image—that propels each investigation forward. Over the years, she has trained as a spy, a police officer, and a journalist embedded in Afghanistan. She has appeared in films recorded on CCTV, been commissioned by the police to bedazzle their surveillance cameras, exhumed an artist’s remains to question the private control of his legacy, and arranged for her own remains to be transformed into a diamond to be owned by a collector after her death. In 2008, her commission from the Dutch Secret Service to give the institution a “human face” culminated in the Dutch government confiscating her work from Tate Modern in London.

Magid’s practice is grounded in lived experience, as she probes the emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between institutions and individual agency. To work with—or from within—large organisations, she seeks out systemic gaps that permit direct engagement with individuals on the “inside”. Her works often unfold through dynamics of seduction, and the resulting narratives frequently take the shape of a love story. These intimate encounters with bureaucratic systems allow her to develop a more nuanced critique, prompting questions about what fears—and whose insecurities—such systems are designed to protect.