Artist’s talk with Victoria Verseau
Victoria Verseau (1988) is a Swedish artist who has pursued a residency for artists in May at the Penedès Marítim Residency (Segur de Calafell), an independent space aimed especially at artists and fields of research with a gender perspective.
To bring her residency to a close, Verseau will be presenting her film A Ghost’s Gaze, which is central to her career. In the video, Verseau returns to the city in Thailand where she underwent gender confirmation surgery in January 2012. Before her operation, she met Meril, who was there for the same reason. The two became friends and supported each other as they faced an uncertain future. Shortly after their operations, Meril committed suicide. The loss of her friend left the artist profoundly bereft and was the reason why she embarked on this film. Verseau revisits the places where her friendship with Meril began, creating a narrative that contains a strange balance of life and death, of memory and forgetting.
Victoria Verseau works in a range of languages that include film, sculpture, installation art and performance. She lives and works in Stockholm and graduated from the Royal Institute of Art there in 2020. She has had exhibitions in a number of venues in Sweden and Europe, and in 2021 her video Approaching a Ghost was Sweden’s contribution to the Artists’ Film International. In 2017, she was awarded the Anna-price WIFT prize for her film work. She is currently working on a feature-length film entitled Meril.