This November Ambika P3 presents A Sense of Place, a major exhibition of the work of British artist Victor Burgin. Five recent digital projection pieces are complemented by earlier photo-text works exploring relations between place, memory and image. Victor Burgin: A Sense of Place opens at Ambika P3 on 1 November.

Victor Burgin first came to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of Conceptual Art, when his work appeared in such key exhibitions as When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and Information (1970). He has since remained one of the most consistently influential artists and art theorists of his generation.

Burgin’s earlier work offered solutions to formal problems in the Minimalism he inherited from such teachers as Robert Morris and Donald Judd; it subsequently came to engage issues of class, gender and sexuality. Burgin’s work is centrally concerned with the ways real objects in actual space are mediated through memory and fantasy—the way ‘space’ becomes place. To this end he explores relationships between words and images—which he sees not as separate entities but rather as a hybrid form producing a ‘virtual’, psychological, image.

The built environment—as a theatre of wishes and fears about past, present and future—is at the forefront of Burgin’s works, which move through promenades and panoramas. The image- text pieces progress along the gallery wall, or wrap around an entire space, or (in later projection pieces) exploit tracking and pan movements familiar from film. These later works answer our frenetic media environment with a contemplative conception of the hybrid virtual image—moving in permanently closed loops, but generating perpetually open spirals of time and memory.

Victor Burgin’s new work for the Ambika P3 exhibition, Mirror Lake, is a response to the Seth Peterson Cottage, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1958 in what is now Mirror Lake State Park, Wisconsin. This work shows concurrently with his other new work, Parzival, commissioned by the Geneva Wagner Festival and installed at the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva.

Exhibition curated by David Campany and Michael Mazière.