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Artissima
30 October - 1 November 2026
Oval Lingotto, Turin, Italy
Oval Lingotto, Turin, Italy
Georgina Starr
STATIC STEPS
1992
Single screen video installation with audio narration, drawings, artist's book and vinyl floor tape
Dimensions Variable
For its third participation in Artissima, Alma Pearl is pleased to return to the Disegni sector with STATIC STEPS (1992), a significant historical installation by Georgina Starr, which anticipates many of the artist’s later collaborations with dancers, performers, and en pointe ballerinas in both film and live performance, such as Before Le Cerveau Affamé (2013), Androgynous Egg (2017), Quarantaine (2020), and her more recent commissions with Hermès: Gelato Balletto! (2022) and Rouge Brillant Silky (2025).
The work comprises six large-scale drawings, a video piece and an accompanying artist’s book, and marks Starr’s first-ever installation. Rooted in the history of performance and dance, the work touches upon the legacies of figures such as Martha Graham and the chance-based movement of her student, Merce Cunningham, while also exploring drawing in an expanded field. Paper becomes the point of departure—cut, imagined, set in motion by static electricity, recorded on video, translated into instructional scripts, and ultimately re-elaborated into six large-scale drawings. Finally, tape on the floor marks the boundary of a dance floor, inviting visitors to participate with their own interpretation of the dance moves.
The video follows the movement of two tissue-paper cut-out dancers. Animated by an unseen, accidental static current, the fragile figures shift, tremble, and flex unpredictably—producing a choreography that is both delicate and volatile. The installation presents six distinct “dance movements,” each named after forms of static lightning: The Static Step, The First Leader, The Streamer, The Stroke, The Attractor, and The Dart Leader. Originally filmed on Video8 and later transferred to U-matic tape, the footage was slowed down frame by frame by the artist. These sequences were meticulously observed, reviewed, and re-watched before being translated into drawings and written notation. The textual component adopts the phrasing and cadence of early 20th-century ballroom and sequence dance manuals. Delivered as an instructional narration by a BBC radio presenter, the voice is at once authoritative, formal, and lyrical. Alongside this, coloured drawings—composed of fine lines, dashes, curved arrows, and footsteps—map out the improbable choreography.
STATIC STEPS is an iconic work that brings together the key elements of Starr’s practice, ranging from her engagement with installation, video, sound, language, and performance, to the almost alchemical process of an idea that materialises in different mediums at the point of interaction between reality and fiction.
Starr’s work has been featured in hundreds of exhibitions in the UK and internationally over the last 35 years, including at Tate Britain, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Kunsthalle Zürich, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, the Venice Biennale, and Glasgow International. Recent exhibitions, projects and performances include The Discreet Dash (2025), a novel published by JOAN Publishing, Rouge Brillant Silky, a performance for Hermès at La Monnaie de Paris, France, and in Shanghai (2025); The Triangles of Ursula (performance), Ex-Chiesa dell’Angelo Custode, Pinksummer Contemporary Art, Genoa, Italy (2024); and Quarantaine, a film project commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella and The Hunterian Glasgow screened as part of the Jarman Award 2021 at Towner Gallery, LUX Scotland, Nottingham Contemporary, Spike Island, G39, The MAC Belfast, and Whitechapel Gallery, London, as well as at Glasgow International 2021, among other venues. Other notable presentations include the performance and installation Moment Memory Monument at Palazzo Reale, Milan (2017); the solo retrospective exhibition Hello. Come here. I want you. at Frac Franche-Comté, France (2017); the live performance commission Androgynous Egg for Frieze Projects (2017); I, Cave at MIMA, Middlesbrough, UK (2015) and I am a Record and I am the Medium, Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France (2010), among others. Georgina’s work is in important collections, including Tate, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; MOCA, Los Angeles; MOMA, New York; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; Reina Sofia, Madrid; amongst many others.