Victoria Verseau: Film Screening
The short film A Ghost’s Gaze is based on Verseau’s experience of transitioning and a gender confirmation surgery in a remote city in Thailand. There she met Meril, who underwent the same surgery. The two women discussed their hopes and dreams, and supported each other in an uncertain time. Three years after the surgery, Meril decided to end her life, something Verseau learned in the midst of an array of personal crises she herself was undergoing. Accustomed to mirroring herself in her only other friend sharing the trans experience, Verseau started asking herself if this would also be her fate.
A Ghost’s Gaze is Victoria Verseau’s attempt to approach the memory of Meril and their time together. Seven years later, Verseau revisits both a place and her memories of it with a camera,: the quiet hotel where they stayed in the months after the surgery to heal, the tidal lands in the outskirts of the city, packages of used hormone pills, dilators, make-up and razors, all emanating a condition between life and death. Looking for some form of resolution or familiarity, Verseau instead finds herself a “ghostly gaze” into a place in-between the past and now, between dream and reality.
The screening will be followed by a conversation between Victoria and artist Liv Bugge, before we welcome you to the official opening of Victoria’s solo exhibition Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For Women Like Us at Fotogalleriet from 7-9pm.
The exhibition is shown at Fotogalleriet (Møllergata 34, 0179 Oslo) from 19 November 2022 until 8 January 2023. See fotogalleriet.no for more information and opening times. Fotogalleriet’s exhibition programme is always free to visit.
The film screening is part of an ongoing partnership between Fotogalleriet and Vega Scene to promote artists’ film and produce discourse and facilitate discussion around image production.
Biographies
Victoria Verseau (b. 1988) works in various media ranging from moving images to sculpture, large-scale installation, and performance. Her artistic practice examines the body and memory formation, shaping identity through the affection of social structures. She is searching to tell untold stories, remaining in the periphery towards oblivion. Approaching destructive forgetfulness, she attempts to capture, preserve and reconstruct the fleeting memories of crucial times that shape subjectivities.Verseau has recently presented solo exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, “Approaching a Ghost,” and Uppsala Konstmuseum, “Engender My Past” (both 2021). Whitechapel Gallery, London; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Para Site, Hong Kong; Foundation Proa, Buenos Aires; KWM artcenter, Beijing, and Project 88, Mumbai, among others, have screened her film Approaching a Ghost (2021). Victoria Verseau lives and works in Stockholm, where she graduated with an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in 2020. She is the 2017 recipient of the ANNA Prize, established by Women in Film and Television (WIFT) Sweden and UN Women Sweden to expand the knowledge of CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms Discrimination against Women). Presently she is working on her debut feature film Meril..
Liv Bugge (b. 1974 in Oslo) lives and works in Oslo. Educated at the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo and HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Art) in Belgium, she has undertaken a practical PhD, The Other Wild, finished in 2019 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, and was shown at the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), curated by Lisa Rosendahl, the same year. From 2012 to 2020 she ran the queer-feminist platform FRANK together with artist Sille Storihle, to nurture art and critical discourse revolving around gender, desire and sexuality. A final publication, FRANK, has been published with Torpedo Books in 2021. Bugge’s work and research seeks to address systems of control and internalised normative structures that harness and govern dualisms like life and non-life, humanness and wildness, by taking conversation and touch as a starting point in the making of artworks. She has been presented at the Armory Show (New York), and been shown in group exhibitions at Kunsthall Trondheim, Melahuset (Oslo), Malmö Konsthall, Festival International de film et video de creation (Beirut), Galerie im Körnerpark (Berlin), Útúrdúr Bókabúð, (Reykiavik) and more. She has had solo presentations in Norway at Interkulturelt Museum, UKS, Sørlandet Kunstmuseum, USF Verftet, amongst others. In 2022 Bugge is participating in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennial curated by Cecilia Alemani. Bugge is currently an associated professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo.