Marie José Burki

Xippas Geneva

Born in 1961 in Bienne, Switzerland, Marie José Burki lives and works between Brussels and Paris.

Photography, neon, text and video are the preferred media used by Marie José Burki. Using visual devices, her work focuses on creating constantly shifting relationships between static and moving images, which ceaselessly interrogate our perceptions of reality in a world saturated with images. Associated with close observation of the background of daily life, the confrontation of these media contributes to the realization of a ‘fixed’ temporality, and, by this very means, to an evocation of time as at once real and suspended, accurately reflecting its relationship to the world in which we live.

The artist is drawn to images of waiting and idleness; the camera films languid bodies in the intimacy of a living room or a hotel room. Beyond an almost absent narrative, a description emerges which plays with pictorial and literary codes, questioning the relationship with the pose in the image, along with the concepts of duration, space and perception. The time filmed by Marie José Burki is not social time. Naked and stripped, the time which passes before our slowed gaze makes us reflect in a world saturated by the acceleration of time.

Her first major solo exhibition took place at the Kunsthalle in Basel in 1995. Between 1998 and 1999 she participated in a series of solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern, the Kunstverien in Bonn, the Camden Arts Center in London and the Kunstverein in Stuttgart. In 1997, in response to an initiative by Diane Shamash and Minetta Brook, she began developing a film and audio project for public space in New York that was presented in May 2001.

Marie José Burki has participated in numerous group exhibitions, for example at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Musem van Hedendaagse Kunst (Muhka) in Antwerp. From 2003 to 2009 she was a professor at the Hochschule Für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. Since 2009, she has been a professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. Since the beginning of her artistic career, Burki has won numerous awards such as the Recognition Award of the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany, the UBS Video Art Award in Switzerland in 1996 and the Sabam Award in 2018. Since 1994 she has been a guest artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.