Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This paper explores the notion of visual and aural excess in a range of video art productions by the Barcelona-based artist, Begoña Egurbide. It discusses the artist’s engagement with corporeal presence – its specific, albeit complex, geo-physical location and materiality – and how this links conceptually to her use of the medium of video. These works are situated in relation to Egurbide’s lenticular photographic work, in particular, the series presented at the Amor Fati exhibition at the Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona) in 2012, where her treatment of body motility enables her to investigate questions of consciousness, memory, and desire by throwing light into the fissures between the visible and the (in-)visible. Attentive to the history of video art – as formulated by Chris Migh Andrews (2016), Michael Rush (2007), and Helen Westgeest, (2016) among others – and its on-going dialogue with and questioning of the purity of the more traditional art disciplines (namely, painting and sculpture), this paper investigates how the aesthetics of this 40-year old medium allow Egurbide to create a (corporeal/material/sensitive) surface which persistently erodes the boundaries between artistic and philosophical disciplines.