Georgina Starr, Hello. Come here. I want you.

This is the first important survey exhibition of Georgina Starr in France. Charting the career of the British artist from 1992 to the present, Hello. Come here. I want you. is also an opportunity to showcase previously unpublished works, produced by the Frac.

Part of a generation of artists who broke with art that sought to be resolutely self-reflective and anti-narrative, Georgina Starr is one of the Young British Artists: a group that appeared on the British art scene in the late 1980s, made up of artists who had opted to express everyday life through at times provocative works that explored both personal narratives and the artist’s role in society. She is also part of a generation who, having grown up in the 1970s with mass media, has been marked by television, films, magazines, the glamour of popular culture, its icons of fashion and pop music – all pervasive influences that constantly fuel her imagination.

Entitled Hello. Come here. I want you.1, Georgina Starr’s exhibition styles itself as a vast installation with a baroque aesthetic. It invites us to enter a composite world punctuated by videos, drawings, photos, scenic devices, her writings and poems, sounds that she has recorded, performances and more generally narratives, which appear to draw on both autobiography and the fantastic, to the extent that we will not attempt to discern the true from the false, preferring to see Georgina Starr as the narrator of a fiction orchestrated around herself. In this strange universe – in some respects perhaps reminiscent of that of Pipilotti Rist (in her jubilant and ironic portrayal of femininity) or of Matthew Barney (for his “wacky” science-fiction aesthetic and his own twists) – memories of childhood or adolescence, with their share of small pleasures, as well as traumatic ordeals, both real or re-imagined, mingle with the supposedly real but ever transforming life experience of someone who has become an adult, an artist and a woman.

1Popular belief has it that Thomas Edison was the first person to use the word “Hello” on the telephone; yet it was the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Bell, who succeeded for the first time in 1876 in transmitting a human voice remotely with the message “Mr Watson, Come here - I want to see you”. Given a new twist here by the artist, these words are ironic in that at the time they foreshadowed the siren song of the communications society and the media. Yet they also seek to take on a completely different meaning here. Wrenched from the past, like voices from beyond the grave, they invite us to look beyond appearances.
 

Curator :
Sylvie Zavatta, director of the Frac

With the support of Fluxus Art Projects