Event

Georgina Starr Book Launch

We hope you can join us for the Book Launch of Georgina Starr's The History of Sculpture on Thursday 28 November from 6.30pm in Cooper Gallery.

Georgina Starr's newly published artist's book, The History of Sculpture, has been commissioned as part of Starr's current Cooper Gallery exhibition, Before Le Cerveau Affamé. We invite you to join us for this evening reception with a late-night opening of Before Le Cerveau Affamé, an exhibition that has received wide critical acclaim.

Photographs of the Book Launch of Georgina Starr's The History of Sculpture. Photos: Alan Hillyer

The History of Sculpture will be available to purchase from Cooper Gallery early in 2014. For more information please see our publications webpage: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/publications/

Starr's Before Le Cerveau Affamé vinyl is available to purchase via Cooper Gallery, please email exhibitions@dundee.ac.uk for more information or see our publications webpage above.

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.

A Salon of The Voice will be hosted by Ella Finer and Alex Hetherington on 28 November from 5.30pm immediately before the Book Launch. A Salon of The Voice is 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. For more information please see: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/exhibitions/events/a-salon-of-the-voice/

For more information, photographs and a video of the Opening Ceremony held during the Preview of 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.