Room, 1970
February 7 - March 22 2003

Victor Burgin's artistic and theoretical project, from its beginnings in Conceptual Art in the late 1960's up to his most recent 'panoramas', is; as he himself has pointed out; a narration of the present, 'where any individual "present moment" lies at the intersection of the private (perceptions, memories, and fantasies) and the public (everyday relations with others and the realm of the political)'.

'Room' 1970 is a narration of this moment. It emerges from a strong commitment to the search for a place of individual persona - a place both mental and physical, but also critical, triggered by the action of, in Roland Barthes's words, 'proceeding in oneself' in a particular time and space. The present, as the artists reminds us, is not 'a perpetually fleeting point on a line "through time" but a collage of disparate times, a imbrication of shifting and contested spaces'. Room, first shown at the Camden Arts Centre consists of strips of paper pasted to the walls, each with a typed sentence drawing attention to an aspect of the otherwise empty room.

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