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.”[1] 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.
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.
[20] She has received various awards, including the Calder Prize 2017,[21] the Basis Stipendium from Fonds Voor Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands in 2006 and a Netherland-American Foundation Fellowship Fulbright Grant from 2001–2002.
Wearing a red trench coat for thirty-one days, Magid periodically contacted on-duty police to train their public cameras on her.
In Trust (2004), a CCTV operator communicates with Magid via mobile phone, guiding the artist – eyes closed – through the city's public spaces.
[26] 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.
[29] 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.
"[28] 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visual work of art in a one-time-only exhibition, after which it would become the property of the Dutch government and not be published.
'"[28] Magid's 2009/10 exhibition at Tate Modern, Authority to Remove, marked the fulfillment of this request: the uncensored report sat securely behind glass.
"[33] Magid responded strongly to "the symbolic gesture of six shots into the sky, the fateful setting, the silence that refuses to ground [Fausto] in political rhetoric or personal instability.
"[32] For Closet Drama, her 2011 exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, and the subsequent Failed States, the artist drew thematic and formal connections between Fausto's act and Goethe's nineteenth-century poem, Faust.
Acting "as eyewitness and dramaturge," Magid linked themes of tragedy and futility between Fausto and his nominal relative, even bringing texts of Faust's monologues into the gallery space as implicit stand-ins for the shooter's silence.
In Magid's hands, the gallery transformed into a "stage to be read," with language, sculpture, video and image creating an intertextual weave between stories and events, individuals and publics, actions and aftermaths.
It is a kind of Faustian pact (a recurring motif for the artist, in fact) with Magid bartering for eternal existence in the form of a carefully curated gemstone commodity, offering her own body as an artwork in the making, and in so doing tying herself in very strange relationship with an unknown Beneficiary: technically she becomes their property-to-be.
The professional archive (along with the rights to the Barragán name) was purchased by Rolf Fehlbaum, the chairman of Vitra a Swiss furniture company, as an engagement present for his at the time fiancée Federica Zanco "in lieu of a ring", as Magid repeats through the film.
[25] Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy (2007) emerged from a five-month period Magid spent shadowing a New York police officer during his nightly rounds through the city's subway system.
[25] Writing in The New York Times, critic Roberta Smith describes Magid's text as "quietly heart-rending novella, a kind of tunnel vision of two people moving along parallel tracks while the city hums around them.
"[55] Part of The Spy Project, Becoming Tarden (2010) is a non-fiction novel that emerged from Magid's interviews with eighteen agents of the Dutch secret service (AIVD).
Following Magid's submission of a draft, in 2008, the organization censored forty percent of the contents, from compromising information to the artist's personal descriptions and recollections.
[25] Failed States (2012) departs from the project of the same name, shifting focus to "CT," a former embedded war correspondent who helps train Magid to embed in Afghanistan.
The artist formerly played the role of incidental witness to Fausto's shooting, but in the book, actively seeks out training with a "personal desire to engage the war on terror and its media representation through becoming an eyewitness.
Her intelligent conceptual strategies engage the viewer in an absorbing aesthetic and intellectual experience that turns conventional assumptions of power, secrecy, control and social space inside out.