ART CITIES:Naples-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? These are questions that the artist and theorist Victor Burgin (has been working on for more than four decades.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo Galleria Lia Rumma Archive

Victor Burgin’s exhibitions are a response to the places and cities to which he is invited and to the inspiration and mental associations that come from them. For “Dear Urania” his solo exhibition at Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples the starting point is “Report on the First Voyage to the Moon Made by a Woman in the Year of Our Lord 2057” (1857), a short pamphlet by the mathematician and astronomer Ernesto Capocci Belmonte (1798-1864), which predates the highly imaginative and far more famous pages by Jules Verne, the protagonist, Urania, writes a long letter from the Moon to her friend Ernestina on Earth. The exhibition is a “Reaction” to this letter. In an intricately allusive multiplication of space-time, gliding between the past and near future, between Naples and America, and from the Moon to the Earth and back, Burgin does not simply transcribe the content of Ernestina’s letter, but rather imagines the circumstances in which it was written. There are two videos, one showing the various phases of the Moon, and the other Ernestina’s words. These appear in the form of intertitles, alternating with the movement of the camera in an almost empty loft. The videos are accompanied by “Pagine dallo Sketchbook di Ernestina Capocci” and the series of photographs, “Basilica I” and “Basilica II”, which suggest an analogy between the lunar landscape and that of Pompeii. Victor Burgin first came to prominence through his inclusion in the landmark Conceptual Art exhibitions: “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations” (1969–70) and “Information” (1970). Informed by semiotics, cinema studies and psychoanalysis he went on to produce a series of influential works using photographs and text reworking the language of mass media into allegories of sexual and political power, memory, history and desire. In a number of projected videos (1999–ongoing) Burgin has turned his attention to architecture and psychical space, to explore how the forces of modernity shape the world in which we live and the unconscious pictures we make of it. Recent works have used computer programs to bring the image closer to its essentially virtual state.

Info: Galleria Lia Rumma, Via Vannella Gaetani 12, Naples, Duration: 16/10/16-14/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-13:30 & 14:30-19:00, www.liarumma.it