Victor Burgin

Victor Burgin is one of the most distinguished teaching artists of our time, whose cross-disciplinary work bridges media, culture and art. He first came to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of conceptual art, and in 1986 was nominated for the Turner Prize. Burgin is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He holds Doctorat Honoris Causa degrees from Sheffield Hallam University, and the University of Liège. Burgin’s photographic and audiovisual work is represented in such public collections as: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. His most recent commissions include works for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; and the projection work bir okuma yeri/a place to read for the Istanbul Archeological Museum in the context of Istanbul 2010 – Cultural Capital of Europe.

Burgin’s academic books include Situational Aesthetics (2009), The Remembered Film (2004), In/Different Spaces: place and memory in visual culture (1996), The End of Art Theory: criticism and postmodernity (1986), and Thinking Photography (1982). The most recent books devoted to his visual work are Components of a Practice (Skira, 2008), and Victor Burgin: Objets Temporels (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007). His forthcoming book, Parallel Texts: interviews and interventions about art, will be published by Reaktion, London, in Spring of 2011. Burgin is currently working on The Prosthetic Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Virtual Worlds, for Polity books.