Victor Burgin: mandarin

Juxta Press is pleased to announce that mandarin by Victor Burgin will launch at FLAT Art Book Fair in Turin on November 1–3. mandarin is a limited edition artist’s book commissioned for Juxta Press’ Afterlife series. Afterlife includes published and upcoming works by Giovanni Anselmo, John Divola, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Kiki Smith, Seton Smith, Haim Steinbach, Ettore Spalletti, Mariko Mori, Joseph Kosuth and Gary Hill.  

The afterlife became a fact 
when technology provided 
a digital copy of the mind 

Two beings result 
one organic the other numeric  
Each evolves separately  
but only one dies   

mandarin contains a series of images shot by Burgin using a virtual inside a rendered videogame environment built by Mountain View Studios. A fantastic tropical landscape governed by dream-logic responds to the fragmented memories of organic life recalled by its digital inhabitant; paths appear from nowhere leading the speaker on journeys that always seem to take them back to the same place. Contemplating paradisal stasis, mandarin is an elliptically lyrical work that explores how we might reconstruct embodied memories in an immaterial and virtual world.

Limited edition of 80
Signed and numbered by the artist
20.7 x 20.7 x 1.7 cm
Printed in Italy
This edition will be released in tandem with an online, freely available digital book

Victor Burgin is an artist and a writer. Over the past decade he has worked exclusively with virtual cameras in 3D computer space, and he emphasises the continuity of the Western perspectival system of representation: from its Quattrocento origins in manual drawing, through its mechanisation via photography, to its now algorithmic expression. Burgin emphasises that no ‘image’ is merely the optical experience of a material thing; all images are psychological events and thus essentially virtual. Together with language they form the complex psychical spaces of fantasy and projection, recognition and misrecognition, joining the realms of intimacy and the political. Burgin’s most recent theory book is The Camera: Essence and Apparatus (2018). The most recent monograph on his visual work is Victor Burgin’s Parzival in Leuven (2017). His still and moving image work is represented in public collections that include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Tate Modern, London; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.