BEATRICE GIBSON

Working in diverse mediums, from text to performance to film, Beatrice Gibson’s most recent pieces explore aural dimensions of the relational, allowing social contexts to become spaces of imagination. In so doing, the artist also questions the possibility of film as an act of representation. In the traditions of Peter Watkins and Jean-Luc Godard, she explores the workings of the medium as fictional, even when engaging non-professional participants in collective ethnographic processes that allow them to reflect on their own reality. Her projects also draw on the traditions of experimental music, concretised in intensive collaborations with musicians and composers, and experimental film. Voice and speech often play a crucial role, interacting with a strong focus on musicality that characterises most of Gibson’s projects.

Born in 1978, Beatrice Gibson received a degree in Philosophy from Manchester University. Between 1999 and 2003 she lived in Bombay, India, where she co-founded the online arts and culture journal and artist collective 'nungu' together with Vishwas Kulkarni. Now disbanded, the group produced and published a series of urban documentation projects and media-based art works. In 2003, Gibson moved back to London to undertake a masters degree in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, where she is currently a PhD student at the Centre for Research Architecture with Eyal Weizman. Gibson was the studio artist in residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art ISP in 2007-8. Recent projects include: taxi_onomy (2005-6), an art-architecture collaboration with architect Celine Condorelli; "if the route": the great learning of london [a taxi opera] (2007), a live performance piece and radio work in seven parts, developed in collaboration with musician and composer Jamie McCarthy; and the films A Necessary Music (2008, awarded at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2009), made in collaboration with composer Alex Waterman and narrated by Robert Ashley, and The Future’s Getting Old Like The Rest of Us (2010), made in collaboration with writer and critic George Clark.