Susan Philipsz
Studied Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee, and then completed an MA in Fine Art in Belfast.She now lives and works in Berlin and the UK. She was awarded the PS1 International studio programme in New York in 2000. Since completing the fellowship she has completed a year long residency at Kunst-Werke Berlin and the international artist programme at Art Pace 2003, San Antonio. She participated in Days Like These The Triennial of British Art, Tate Britain 2003. Using the evocative power of sound, Philipsz constructs a body of work that she defines through the memories, references and emotions that sounds produce in us. Philipsz creates works with her own voice. By no means trained in bel canto, its spontaneity and lack of professional training helps build emotional bonds between the pieces and the spectator. In her installations well-known popular songs are interpreted by the artist in order to reformulate the perception of the exhibition space into a pleasing and peculiar invitation to an artistic experience. In this way, subjectivity takes on an even greater importance because it shapes a different work for each spectator. Nonetheless, what Philipsz is after in her work is to plumb the limits of the visitor’s performative capacity in his/her displacement to other spaces and moments, and examine the sculptural potential that can be created using sound as a moulding
element.
