Absent | Present
Montserrat Gallery
January 25 – March 30, 2013
Absent | Present features the work of Kate Gilmore and Zsuzsanna Szegedi, two artists who question the role of documentation in performance work and expand video as an artistic medium. They aspire to take video beyond being viewed as solely document, evidence or original video art to a place where it is all of the above.
Exhibition Curator Leonie Bradbury suggests, "The video exists as a document, a work of art, and as an integral hub in a relation made up of parts. Gilmore and Szegedi's processes challenge the boundaries of contemporary artistic practice to portray the multiple locations of artwork within a piece, to question where and when a work of art begins or ends, and demand viewers to expand their opinions of where the art is located."
Gilmore challenges the innate hierarchy of the work of art and problematizes whether the piece is a sculpture, a performance, a work of video art, and her process suggests that every work is in fact all of the above. For Szegedi, the video is a part of the overall piece rather than the document of it; she overturns the binary opposition of a work of art and its video counterpart.
