Victoria Verseau

Recipient of the Uppsala Municipal Award Grant for Newly Graduated Visual Artists 2020/21. 

7 october–21 november 2021.

“I can´t go back into the past and change it, but I have noticed that the future changes the past”, writes Jeanette Winterson in the novel Gut Symmetries. The artist Victoria Verseau applies the same attempting attitude and lets the present mirror the past in an examination of body and identity.

The exhibition Engender my past at Uppsala Art Museum is a complete installation where memory fragments are materialized as sculpture or moving image. Newly produced pieces relate to previously shown art works. Materials such as neon, acrystal linoleum and latex links to smell and tactility and emits the same elusive fragility as a cared for memory. Thematically Victoria Verseau returns to the hotel in Thailand where she in 2012 underwent gender confirmation surgery. She remembers her friend Meril from this formative time and reflects on the void her lost life created. The silent hotel, the swamp surrounding the city, package of used hormone pills, dilators to widen and deepen the new vagina, make-up - all depicted in a condition between life and death.

The English word engender can be understood as develop or create and this exhibition portrays a process, but it also asks questions on how the process of becoming interacts with memory and oblivion, dreams and disappointments. As a viewer we are invited into a private room and become involved in the transition and the mental and physical journey from boy to woman.

Victoria wants to shed light on her and the friend Merlis struggles in the periphery of society and “bring to light what still remains in a destructive oblivion”. Thus, this process contains a big amount of ambivalence of wanting to show and still hide. The different identities merge, but they can never be completely coherent. In the poem Wild Iris the author Louise Glück writes: “whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice”.

Victoria Verseau (b. 1988) is active in the field of plastic art, filmmaking and large-scale installations, moving image and performances. She examines gender identities and social structures in the framework of her own trans-identity. Besides the solo show at Uppsala Art Museum Verseau will show her work at Bonniers Konsthall later this year. She is also working with her first feature film Meril, that will premiere in the coming years.

Her film Approaching a Ghost (2020) was selected by Bonniers konsthall as the Swedish contribution to Artists Film International 2021 and will be shown at prestigious art institutions around the world. In 2017 she got the feminist Anna-film award, a stipend from Women in Film & Television and UN Women Sweden.

Victoria Verseau is a MFA graduate from the Royal Institute of Art, in Stockholm. In 2020/21 Verseau was the recipient of the Uppsala Municipal Award Grant for Newly Graduated Visual Artists, which consists of a one year’s studio space on the premises of Hospitalet studio association in the Ulleråker area,as well as the opportunity to exhibit at the Uppsala Art Museum.