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Victor Burgin

Hotel D
09.25.09 - 10.18.09
Exhibition — Hôtel-Dieu

View of the exhibition Hôtel D, 2009, photo Damien Aspe, ©Printemps de Septembre—à Toulouse

Born in1941 in Sheffield (United Kingdom), he lives between London and San Francisco (USA).

 

Victor Burgin, an English artist and theorist, can be seen as an extremely contemporary figure of the narrator. For the narratives he elaborates by associating texts and images are fragmented, perforated, open to analysis, to a diversity of possible meanings, and question our representations and the various social codes that govern them. Reflection on the meaning, association and memory of images, and thus on the environment that surrounds us.

 

The installation Hôtel D is composed of digitized images of the Pilgrims' Room projected within this room, followed by a voice-over broadcast in the adjacent chapel. Victor Burgin thus offers visitors an evocation of his experience at the Hôtel-Dieu as well as an invitation to awaken their own impressions of the space through the interplay of words and images moving back and forth between the two rooms.

 

What does the festival’s subtitle “There, where I am , does not exist” mean to you?
First of all it directs my attention towards the temporal dimension of a “spatial” experience. Heraclitus famously observed that you cannot bath twice in the same river—the place where I am now, even as I speak, passes perpetually into non-existence. The implied “I am there” also suggests the spatialization of the ego, and the self-alienation at the core of identity which Lacan noted in his concept of the “mirror stage”—so the implied “that’s me, over there” may also invoke Rimbaud’s “I is an other”.

 

According to you, what can art accomplish?
The answer to this question will differ according to history and geography. In the West, and during the 20th and 21st centuries, I think that the most important work that art can attempt is to provide alternatives to the hegemonic popular common sense created by industrialized mass culture and propagated by the media. That is to say, to support the exercise of one's own intellectual and sensual faculties, without ceding to pressures from outside.

Exhibition produced by the Jeu de Paume, Paris