Kai Art Center is proud to present the duo exhibition Great Pretender by Gabriele Beveridge and Marge Monko. Sharing a fascination with consumer images and objects from the world of 20th century advertising and display, the two artists exhibit together for the first time, showing new and recent works. Gabriele Beveridge will present sculptural works constructed on the basis of shop-fittings, hand-blown glass, photographic chemicals and mannequin parts. Marge Monko will exhibit a series of photos of window displays as well as a new video exploring the symbolic, cultural and aesthetic meaning of stockings in history. Choreography for the video Sheer Indulgence, performed by four dancers, is inspired by commercials for stockings from the 1970s and 1980s as well as specific historic events like the shortage of stockings during the Second World War. Premiering at Kai, the music for the video was created by Estonian sonic duo Helen Västrik and Ave Vellesalu under the name Vera Vice.
The exhibition text was written by art critic and director of Der Neue Essener Kunstverein Moritz Scheper. According to Scheper, “Beveridge and Monko each examine the ways in which enchantment is staged within consumer contexts, and in both cases this analysis is inseparable from the question of how the formative character of these techniques effects the self-understanding – and above all the self-image – of women.”
Great Pretender will be open from September 18 to November 28, 2021. The exhibition belongs to the satellite program of the 6. Tallinn Photomonth.
An artists’ tour with Gabriele Beveridge and Marge Monko will take place on Saturday, September 18th at 2pm.
Gabriele Beveridge (b. 1985, Hong Kong) lives and works in London. Through strategies of selection, framing and recombination, Beveridge reconfigures the hierarchies of commercial images and objects. Her diverse assemblages, including hand-blown glass, shop-fittings and found images, seek to examine the relationship between the shared access that everyone might have to the visual languages that saturate our contemporary existence and the special access that each of us has to personal memory. Recent solo exhibitions include Softened Future Life at FreeHouse (London, 2020), Tender Greed at Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal, 2019), Live Dead World at Seventeen (London, 2018), Eternity Anyways at Chewday’s (London, 2016), Mainland at MOT (Brussels, 2015), Health and Strength at La Salle de Bains (Lyon, 2014).
Marge Monko (b. 1976, Tallinn) lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She has studied at the Estonian Academy of Arts and at HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Ghent, Belgium, and works with photography, video and installation. Her works are inspired by historical images and influenced by theories of psychoanalysis, feminism and visual culture. She works as a professor in the Photography Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts. Monko has had solo exhibitions at Folkwang Museum (Essen, 2019) and at mumok (Vienna, 2013). She has shown her work at the Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art RIBOCA1 (Riga, 2018), Manifesta 9 (Genk, 2012) and at COSAR HMT gallery (Düsseldorf, 2021).
This exhibition is generously supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment and the Tallinn Culture Department.
Special thanks to Põhjala Brewery.
