Marie-José Burki

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 realisation 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 of the body 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.

Marie José Burki was born in Biel, Switzerland. In 1981 she began studying French Literature and History at the University of Geneva. From 1983, she simultaneously attended the Ecole supérieure d’art visuel and studied with Silvie and Cherif Defraoui. She completed her university studies in 1988 with a dissertation on Raymond Roussel. In 1989 she spent several months in Paris at the Citée des arts. In 1990 she lived in New York, working at the the PS1 Studio Program. She lived in Paris and Geneva after her return to Europe. She participated in Jan Hoet’s documenta IX in 1992. Marie José Burki has lived and worked in Brussels since 1993. She has been a visiting artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam several times since 1994. Her first major solo exhibition took place at Kunsthalle Basel in 1995. Her daughter Svetlana was born in 1996. Between 1998 and 1999 she had a series of solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bern, Kunstverein in Bonn, Camden Arts Center in London and Kunstverein in Stuttgart. Her first solo exhibition in Paris took place at Galerie Nelson in 1997. This was followed by the first solo exhibition in New York at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in 1998. 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 in 1997. The presentation followed in May 2001. Burki directed the postgraduate programme at the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon from 2000 to 2002. Her first solo exhibition in a Belgian museum took place at the Musée des arts contemporains, Grand Hornu, in 2003. Marie José Burki has participated in numerous group exhibitions, for example, at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA) in Antwerp. From 2003 to 2009, she held a professorship at the Hochschule für bildende künste in Hamburg. She has held a professorship at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris since 2009.

In 2017, she will have solo shows at the Centre Régional de la Photographie Nord Pas-de-Calais in France, at the Kunsthaus Pasquart in Bienne, Switzerland, and at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.