Through her work Georgina Starr constructs intimate and remote portraits.

The disclosure of disparate clues and the production of archives shape her fragile and cerebral body of work. She forms installations which are paradoxically domestic and distant, raw and delicate, scientific and pop. The use of black and white and the superimposition of images of her mother, of a forgotten silent film actress and of the artist herself in different roles, generate a feeling of shared intimacy mixed with nostalgia.

This first solo show of the artist’s work in France is constructed around the installation I Am a Record: a body of recordings in the form of unique, single-copy pressings of vinyl LPs, each accompanied by a cover painted or drawn by the artist. Random archival documents, collected over more than twenty years, reveal a fragmented autobiography and evoke the environment of this Young British Artist.

The work presented here covers everything that Georgina Starr has recorded since the age of five: from the rumbling of a broken radiator which she imagined was sending her a message, the re-recording of conversations with strangers, singing voices, a telepathic phone conversation, a family dinner and a collection of whistles, to messages from the beyond from deceased friends, love letters, recordings of heavy metal music, and even the sound of her own record collection going up in flames.

These recent investigations led the artist to take an interest in a forgotten actress of the silent screen: Theda Bara. In 1918, the actress was a star, as famous as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. Between 1915 and 1920, Theda Bara starred in more than forty films and played a phenomenal number of different roles. She played eccentric characters, from queens and princesses to vampires and vagabonds, infusing every shot of her movies with the full range of the expression of human feelings. She also played an important role in the burgeoning film industry. The William Fox Studio molded the vivacious and eccentric young actress, creating an enchanting biography for her. Everyone wanted her, but soon the systematic repetition of roles and the ensuing boredom led to her inexorable decline. Of the forty films made during this period, only two remain, the others lost through negligence or the many fires which have decimated this filmic heritage. Using film synopses, notes, critiques and photographs, Georgina Starr has reconstructed the sets and reinterpreted certain scenes of the lost films, presenting them in the form of film concerts or film installations.

The costumes, sets, videos and props are brought together here in an installation created specially for this exhibition.

Georgina Starr also communicates with spirits. She regularly consults mediums and records each meeting. For the work I Am the Medium, she has chosen to produce a vinyl record featuring samples of these recordings in the formed of locked grooves. The locked groove process for pressing vinyl records creates loops of sound which are slightly less than two seconds in duration. The record produced for the exhibition includes 250 loops from the artist’s séances.