Exhibitions, performances, videos, design objects and installations by Georgina Starr (1968, Leeds, United Kingdom, lives in London) are at one and

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Exhibitions, performances, videos, design objects and installations by Georgina Starr (1968, Leeds, United Kingdom, lives in London) are at one and the same time a glittering and melancholic theatre

Everything happens as if it were experienced twice, as though recorded, listened again and rewritten, once for herself and then again for her double, the stranger inside her.

1 Exhibitions, performances, videos, design objects and installations by Georgina Starr (1968, Leeds, United Kingdom, lives in London) are at one and the same time a glittering and melancholic theatre of memory and recollections of her family childhood, or of fragments of life in the practice of her adventures as an artist. Everything happens as if it were experienced twice, as though recorded, listened again and rewritten, once for herself and then again for her double, the stranger inside her. The public that follow her journey, in order to take from her moments in which to identify, get carried away, enjoy or be moved by her personal, intimate, fragile appearance. I am a Record, I am the Medium, The Face of Another are titles that reveal much of the darker side of this artist, seductive, sensitive, international exponent of the Young British Artist generation. Georgina Starr manages to formalise, in her multimedia language, the absence, disappearance, the dark side, sometimes sinister, of an event, a secret, a miracle. She worked on The Miracle Series after experiencing symptoms of The Stendhal Syndrome while looking at a portrait by the artist Eugen Zeller in Zurich: that was She is now in Genoa, for her fourth solo exhibition, The Joyful Mysteries of Junior, at Pinksummer: saffron yellow blouse, brick red trousers, slight, smiling, ready for dialogue, attentive to the details of her installation: on show in a photographic self- portrait (Portrait for Junior's 18th Birthday, 2011) full of pathos, Georgina, wearing a graceful pink beret, hugs her alter ego Junior, complete with blue cap, to whom she lends her infant voice: a rag doll sewn 18 years ago and then shut away in a suitcase, now reappears in a video asking the reason for such a prolonged abandonment: both wearing white. On show is also a collection of vintage postcards showing female ventriloquists beside their puppets (The Mothers, 2011). The sweeping drapes of a gold curtain hanging from the ceiling welcome the spectator head on, concealing behind an oversized suspended brain (The Brain, 2011), whose folds are made from pink chewing gum, chewed, with its inevitable as well

2 as nauseating smell of strawberry, as the press releases states. Watercolors in soft green and pink representing a Belle Epoque ballet company, are lined up along the walls: a recurring element is a bubble that, in the exhibition context, refers to the belly of a pregnant woman. Strips of stage footlighting (The Decades, 2012) echo the soft colours of the dancers' costumes. When at the performance begins, the public sees three young tap dancers in black tights, on which hands of pink cloth have been sewn on their simulated pregnant bellies, who then, while chewing, blow up a Big Bubble, announced by Georgina as homage to her Junior: on drums an impeccable Sergio Bertola. For each of the three girls, an announcer in white jacket and black tights comes on with a vintage photographic work from the series Devotions, 2012, where on the pubes of three depicted women the performer in turn will stick her Big Bubble. The sign of the double, in the evolution of language, becomes the favourite form in Georgina Starr's work, the trace of a particular slice of life, the groove of a vinyl record where the pick up sticks, the diptych of the portrait of herself with her mother (The Face of Another, 2007), in which the age difference disappears in the dresses and make- up that present them projected, a rebours, in the '70's. With the style and willingness that characterise her, Georgina Starr gets ready to be interviewed. VC: How do you define yourself as artist? GS: Hopefully through my work. VC: What is your bond to the cinema? GS: The memory of a film or the events surrounding that experience have been the starting point for some of my works. I'm interested in overlapping the film fiction with

3 real- life experiences to create a new dimension. In The Bunny Lake Series ( ) I moved back and forth between the invented world inside two 1960's films (Bunny Lake is Missing and Targets) and the real events experienced within my family in the 70's, especially in connection to my sister. As the work evolved the line between the two became more and more blurred. The character of Bunny Lake and my sister totally merged, so by the last episode (Inside Bunny Lake Garden, 2003) I had found myself scaling a 3 metre brick wall and entering the film- set. With The Joyful Mysteries of Junior (shown at Pinksummer) cinema was less of a catalyst. I was initially thinking more about television and the early TV studios of the 1960's and 70's. The installation in the gallery is a reflection on both the 'TV studio' and the dance studio. While performing in my own studio it began to transform into something that resembled my ideal of a television studio. The gold curtain (which is part of the installation) was from a local TV station that had closed down, and there were other integral elements; a small tap dancing stage, a sound recording booth, a mirrored wall and coloured lights. The glass and metal sculptural works ( The Decades, 2011 ) relate directly to stage footlights, but they also incorporate the 'the bubble' which is at the centre of this new work. I like to imagine that you could place these bubble sculptures anywhere and you automatically have 'a stage'. The paintings in the show ( The Annunciation of Junior, 2011 ) relate to the cinema in that they are plans for future films. VC: - and to the theatre? GS: I am interested in the mechanism of the theatre: the curtain, the platform of the stage, the set, the actor and the props, it's the individual components that fascinate me. Acting and the theatre were at the heart of THEDA (2007). THEDA was about hiding and revealing emotional states When I exhibit THEDA I use an 'actual' theatre as a settin g to present the work. THEDA is a silent film but the sound element is performed live, it's different every time. For a recent screening I presented it on stage in an old end- of- pier theatre in the UK. The film was projected on stage and the accompanist (the German soprano Sigune von Osten) was also on stage performing, so it became a type of double

performance; myself as 'Theda' in the film and Von Osten performing live to create the voice. It was the closest I have ever come to making actual theatre. VC:- and to the woman figure, as you are?

In The Joyful Mysteries of Junior I continue to question the psychological anxieties around motherhood and daughterhood as well as ideas of spiritualism and future possible worlds.

4 performance; myself as 'Theda' in the film and Von Osten performing live to create the voice. It was the closest I have ever come to making actual theatre. VC:- and to the woman figure, as you are? GS: The female voice is always central. In The Joyful Mysteries of Junior I continue to question the psychological anxieties around motherhood and daughterhood as well as ideas of spiritualism and future possible worlds. In this new work I imagined myself like Faust entering the Realm of the Mothers. "The Mothers! Mothers!...These goddesses exist beyond the range, of mortals: even we avoid their name. To find them, you must fathom the abyss." The paintings are a route into this realm, but the bubblegum is the 'potion' ingested to secure a passage through to the other side. An alchemical process takes place when you chew the bubblegum. Many bubbles have to be blown before you can enter. The women in the paintings (and the performance) are 'The Mothers'. In the first painting (The Annunciation of Junior (The First Voice Enters the Bubble), 2011) you can see a tunnel, it's like a theatrical set, but it's also like an opening to a cave or the entrance to another world. VC: - why in the - fashion, make up, furniture and design you look to the past, above all to the Thirty years? GS: I'm not fixed on any particular era. In The Bunny Lake Series I was preoccupied with the 60's and 70's; cars, girl- gangs and drive- in movie culture, in THEDA it was the theatre and cinema of the early 1900's, and The Joyful Mysteries of Junior is placed somewhere between the 1930's Hollywood, 1970's TV- land and the future. VC:- in the psychoanalytic field, you refer more to the Jung archetypes, to the libido in Freud, or to the mirror stadium in Lacan? GS: I don't consciously refer to any of them. While making The Joyful Mysteries of Junior I was reading the novels of three female writers who are all dealing with psychological states and the two- world paradigm. Anna Kavan's Ice, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. I was also in constant

5 conversation with Junior. VC:- your imagination is closer to the torturer or to the victim? GS: Neither, it's more like the detective. VC:- Narrative dimension is important in your work? GS: There are always multiple narratives at work. Cheerful but already drifting in her mind, Georgina Starr leaves the scene. 20th January, 2012.

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