Future Flares Festival: Vermisserin (Eng. the female surveyor) (draft 3) by Brigitte Jurack

Friday 24th January 2025: 1-2pm

Grosvenor East Building (Studio 1.10)

Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, I have been grappling with the question if and how, as an artist, I can and cannot react/speak/create. The war seems remote, and this remoteness is weirdly mirrored in the “new technological warfare” of remote-controlled drones. Having grown up during the Cold War, with relatives in East Germany, historical entanglement and more recent trauma of occupations also re-surfaces.

In summer 2022, Jurack began to write, connecting the micro cosmos of remote rural life with the macro cosmos of current warfare in Ukraine, and the ripples of cold-war memory. She also developed 18 monoprints on plastic film, which need to be held up to a light source and are layered, scratched and messy surface. They show ‘noisy’ night skies, populated with remote drones.

The promenade performance, will for the first time, bring together the voices of the female surveyor with film clips of details of the monoprints.

Brigitte Jurack is Reader in sculpture/time-based arts at Manchester School of Art, and studied at Kunstakademie Duesseldorf, Glasgow School of Art and Chelsea College of Art & Design in London.

As an artist, Jurack looks at the world as it is and tries to make sense of it; her process could be described as picking up what is already out there. The material and non-material outcomes of what actually appears in the studio or exhibition are driven by the desire to create and hold on to the elusiveness of visual sensations.

Jurack has exhibited widely, including Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), European Ceramic Work Centre (Hertogenbosch) and The 3rd World Water Conference (Kyoto). She was the 1993 Henry Moore Sculpture Fellow and her 2022/23 solo exhibition at HOME, Manchester was nominated for the Manchester Culture Award. Jurack is also founding member of the artists' group Foreign Investment who have exhibited in Rio de Janeiro, Kiev, Hong Kong, Oslo, Berlin and the Istanbul and Venice Biennials.