Five Pieces for Projection introduces recent projection work from 2010 to 2014, with an essay by Hanne Loreck, an afterword by Eva Schmidt and texts by Victor Burgin.
How can the suggestive power of images be activated? What effect is generated by the conjunction of images and text? How do the images of our own memory interrelate with images from cinema or art history?
Victor Burgin's Five Pieces for Projection introduces recent projection work from 2010 to 2014, and coincides with the artist and writer's retrospective exhibition “Forms of Telling” at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen. Each of the five projections presented in the catalogue is accompanied by a text by Burgin that discusses how the work emerges from a personal experience, a preoccupation with a building, a place, or a Romantic painting.
Like a visual diary, a fictional narrative, or historical document, Burgin's projection work takes us on a journey to different places and situations. This publication too reads like a film or a moving storyline where real and imaginary images are activated and interwined through the use of photographs, paintings, and brief textual recollections. Hanne Loreck's detailed essay discusses some of Burgin's digital image projections, such as Dovedale (2010) and Mirror Lake (2013), considering the visual-textual effect of Burgin's work and the atmospheres created that trigger numerous associations in the viewer—of a book, a film, or a personal memory.
Published on the occasion of exhibition “Victor Burgin: Forms of Telling,” at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Germany, March 23–June 15, 2014.
Victor Burgin's early photo-text pieces are among the seminal works of conceptual art. Since the 1990s, moving image works have taken over from that specific type of montage. Circling, panning, zooming movements draw us artificial image sequences; voices off-screen or intertitles permeate and carry the images. In this way Victor Burgin generates completely new, exciting visual and textual contexts. Here, the use of inner monologue may be as important as the connection between an inner idea and the external world. These discontinuing encounters between images and narrative threads are one thing, suggestive of surrealism and dreams, but his work is also political in an extremely up-to-date sense. Victor Burgin reacts to places and situations, to the cities in which he is invited to exhibit. Intuitively, he follows a trail of personal associations triggered by what he finds on site. In this context, he often recalls something else – a book, a film or a personal memory. As the artist once put it, he sees the world of images and narratives as a theorist who teaches, gives lectures and publishes books, and as an artist who exhibits his works in galleries and museums.
Victor Burgin is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of London. His theory books include The Remembered Film (Reaktion Books, 2004) and In / Different Spaces: place and memory in visual culture (University of California Press, 1996).
