30/10/2013
Victor Burgin
Ambika P3, London
A Sense of Place. Burgin's work is concerned with the ways real objects in actual space are mediated through memory and fantasy - the way 'space' becomes place. To this end he explores relationships between words and images - which he sees not as separate entities but rather as a hybrid form producing a 'virtual', psychological, image.
curated by David Campany and Michael Mazière
Ambika P3 is delighted to present A Sense of Place, a major exhibition of the work of Victor Burgin. Five recent digital projection pieces are complemented by earlier photo-text works exploring relations between place, memory and image.
Victor Burgin first came to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of Conceptual Art, when his work appeared in such key exhibitions as When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and Information (1970). He has since remained one of the most consistently influential artists and art theorists of his generation.
Burgin’s work is concerned with the ways real objects in actual space are mediated through memory and fantasy—the way ‘space’ becomes place. To this end he explores relationships between words and images—which he sees not as separate entities but rather as a hybrid form producing a ‘virtual’, psychological, image.
The built environment—as a theatre of wishes and fears about past, present and future—is at the forefront of Burgin’s works, which move through promenades and panoramas. The image- text pieces progress along the gallery wall, or wrap around an entire space, or (in later projection pieces) exploit tracking and pan movements familiar from film. These later works answer our frenetic media environment with a contemplative conception of the hybrid virtual image—moving in permanently closed loops, but generating perpetually open spirals of time and memory.
Victor Burgin’s new work for the Ambika P3 exhibition, Mirror Lake, is a response to the Seth Peterson Cottage, designed
by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1958 in what is now Mirror Lake State Park, Wisconsin.
About Victor Burgin:
Victor Burgin taught at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster) from 1973 to 1988. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986. His achievements as a visual artist are unique in that he is equally influential both as a practitioner and as a theorist. His still and moving image works, and his extensive and widely translated writings, have had a profound effect on the landscape, language and teaching of the visual arts in general, and photography in particular, both in Britain and abroad.
Victor Burgin is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Emeritus Millard Chair of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Burgin’s theory books include Parallel Texts: interviews and interventions about art (2011), Situational Aesthetics (2009), The Remembered Film (2004), In/Different Spaces: place and memory in visual culture (1996), The End of Art Theory: criticism and postmodernity (1986), and Thinking Photography (1982). The most recent books devoted to his visual work are Components of a Practice (2008), published by Skira, and Victor Burgin: Objets Temporels (2007), published by the Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Burgin’s work is represented in public collections that include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Tate Modern, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
In Conversation:
21 November 6.30pm
CREAM (the Centre for Research and Education in the Arts and Media)
presents Victor Burgin in conversation with curator David Campany.
Hogg Lecture Theatre, University of Westminster,
35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS
Free admission, for tickets contact: p3.exhibitions@ westminster.ac.uk
Related Exhibition:
31 October – 6 December
Victor Burgin: Works on Paper
Richard Saltoun Gallery,
111 Great Titchfield Street
London, W1W 6RY
This exhibition is supported by Arts Council England, Ambika P3, The University of Westminster, The Henry Moore Foundation, The Elephant Trust and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
More informations:
Niall Carter, Venue Manager T: +44 (0)79115876 N.D.Carter01@westminster.ac.uk
Private View Thursday 31 October 2013 18.30 to 20.30
Ambika P3
University of Westminster
35 Marylebone Road, London