Event

A Salon of The Voice

We hope you can join us for A Salon Of The Voice on Thursday 28 November from 5.30pm

Ella Finer and Alex Hetherington will host A Salon of the Voice, an event taking its inspiration and provocation from Georgina Starr's current exhibition Before Le Cerveau Affamé and her particular use of the voice. Meeting for the first time and bringing together their shared interest in the way voice performs inside and outside the artwork, the hosts will offer their own reflections on Starr's past, present and future work as well as opening the floor to invite response, recollection and reverberation on the theme and its tangents.

Ella Finer is a writer, artist and lecturer whose practice in theatre, photography and sound explores the relationship of the gendered body and voice. With attention to how the politics of audibility and visibility interact, her performance and installation work often composes the live and the recorded together, layering the two as material elements with their own distinct temporalities. She holds a PhD from Roehampton University, London and has presented her scholarly work at symposia across the UK and internationally. In London she has exhibited work and performed at Raven Row, Bloomberg Space, Flat Time House and Olympia amongst others. Recent projects include producing the Building Sound symposium; live and radio performances of her voice-scores A Play for Offstage Voices, Playing Host and 1974; solo exhibition Where We Meet, Volumes 1 and 2 at Galerie8, London Fields; and the experimental project O at Baltic|39, Newcastle, testing how a sound work can make itself through unmaking itself: playing a record continuously until it is played out.

Alex Hetherington is a visual artist with a practice in film, text and sculpture who works under the title Modern Edinburgh Film School. He produces complex projects on the ideas of film, poetic form and sculptural process.

Modern Edinburgh Film School is currently producing a new film and print project "Yvonne, in Two Parts" for Michelle Hannah to be screened at the CCA, undertaking written work on the project Before Le Cerveau Affamé by Georgina Starr at Cooper Gallery, Dundee. In late November, Modern Edinburgh Film School will publish The Free Arc of Life, an edition on Karen Cunningham, Allison Gibbs, Mairi Lafferty and Georgina Starr. Forthcoming in 2014 include a work at Atelier Public at Gallery of Modern Art during Gi and an event on film, duration and conversation for Glasgow Film Festival.

Recent projects as Modern Edinburgh Film School include The Hand That Hold The Desert Down, 15 March 2013 ESW and Green Screen, a group exhibition at Embassy, 15–31 March 2013, April Set, 26, 27 and 30 April with ZoÎ Fothergill, Sarah Forrest and Anthony Schrag, and a short research residency at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, The Slow-Wave with Lynsday Mann at Talbot Rice Gallery and The Good Work at Inspace, featuring Catherine Street, Claire Denis and Bobby Niven. 6000 Posters for Giants and Dwarfs, June, Rhubaba Gallery and Studios, Videotheque, a residency and screening event at Make Shift, Talbot Rice Gallery, June, Lauren Gault: Granular and Crumb, July at ESW, Ute Aurand: FILME, August at Stills Gallery and Modern Edinburgh Film School at Product, ESW for Edinburgh Art Festival 2013. Hold This Object Up Until There is Nothing Left of You, 31 August 2013, closed the project’s residency at ESW.

Footage of Ella Finer and Alex Hetherington : A Salon of the Voice from www.summerhall.tv on Vimeo.

Photographs of A Salon of The Voice taken by Alan Hillyer.

A Salon of The Voice is a Satellite Event to Georgina Starr's Before Le Cerveau Affamé and will be followed by the Book Launch for Georgina Starr's artist's book, The History of Sculpture. We hope you can join us for an evening reception in Cooper Gallery from 6.30pm.

Georgina Starr, Before Le Cerveau Affamé continues in Cooper Gallery until 13 December

Le Cerveau Affamé (The Hungry Brain) is a place. It is also a game that one may or may not be invited to play. The entrance into Le Cerveau Affamé is via a set of cards, each selection proposes a different journey.

The Cooper Gallery is proud to present Before Le Cerveau Affamé, a space for metaphysical transformation, by Georgina Starr, one of the most original and distinctive British artists celebrated internationally since the 1990s for her magically complex and multi-layered works.

Developed especially for the Cooper Gallery’s unique architectural setting, Starr offers a glimpse into ‘Le Cerveau’ and introduces us to its main motifs, the four suits of ‘The Brain’, ‘The Bubble’, ‘The Cat’ and ‘The Hand’.

An abiding preoccupation of Georgina Starr has been the conception of other possible worlds, but these worlds are more that just the creative imaginings of an artist. Imbued with inexplicably emotive renderings of her own languages and characters, Starr’s work is an intense and introspective cosmology. Folding together fiction, history, philosophy and spiritualism, Starr illuminates a vast topology of the self, haunted by the medium of her own voices. Deep within this murmur the inherently speculative truth of biography is endlessly transformed, propelling the self into an abyss held fast between what was, is and could be.

Georgina Starr rose to prominence in the early 1990s and was included in many iconic international exhibitions of the YBA era with her astonishingly refreshing works including Crying (1993), The Nine Collections of the 7^th Museum (1994), Visit to a Small Planet (1995), Hypnodreamdruff (1996), The Bunny Lake Series (1999-2003) Theda (2007-10), and The Joyful Mysteries of Junior (2012).

Starr’s practice of combining fiction, memory and a baroque sensibility defies the tight categories of most forms of exhibition making. Yet this is the strength of her work. Sidestepping simple readings informed by common understandings of sculpture, film, drawing or installation, Starr’s disruption and melding of forms unplugs the possibility of there being an everyday. It is this unsettling move that drives the viewer to a radically different understanding of the self and its limitless biographies.

For more information on this exhibition please see: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/exhibitions/georgina-starr-before-le-cerveau-affame/

This project is kindly supported by The National Lottery through Creative Scotland and The Henry Moore Foundation.