The exhibition is open at Kai Art Center from September 18th to November 28th, Wed–Sun from 12pm to 7pm.
An exhibition tour with the artists (in English) takes place on Saturday, September 18th at 2pm.
Sharing a fascination with consumer images and objects from the world of 20th century advertising and display, the two artists Gabriele Beveridge and Marge Monko exhibit together for the first time showing new work at the exhibition 'Great Pretender'. Gabriele Beveridge will present sculptural works constructed on the basis of shop-fittings, hand-blown glass, photographic chemicals and mannequin parts. Marge Monko will exhibit a series of photos of window displays and a new video exploring the connections between stockings and female emancipation. Both Beveridge and Monko employ visual strategies that work less to dismantle conventions of the beautiful than to exaggerate them, initiating a fluctuation between the attractive and the unfamiliar. The ordered allure of the shop window or beauty display is thus rendered sublime and contemplative through its own excess.
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Gabriele Beveridge (b. 1985, Hong Kong) lives and works in London. Through strategies of selection, framing and recombination Beveridge reconfigures the hierarchies of commercial images and objects. Her diverse assemblages, including hand-blown glass, shop-fittings and found images, seek to examine the relationship between the shared access that everyone might have to the visual languages that saturate our contemporary existence and the special access that each of us has to personal memory. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Softened Future Life' at FreeHouse (London, 2020), 'Tender Greed' at Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal, 2019), 'Live Dead World' at Seventeen (London, 2018), 'Eternity Anyways' at Chewday's, (London, 2016), 'Mainland' at MOT (Brussels, 2015), 'Health and Strength' at La Salle de Bains (Lyon, 2014).
Marge Monko (b. 1976, Tallinn) lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She has studied in Estonian Academy of Arts and in HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Ghent, Belgium, and works with photography, video and installation. Her works are inspired by historical images and influenced by theories of psychoanalysis, feminism and visual culture. She works as a professor in the Photography Department of Estonian Academy of Arts. Monko has had solo exhibitions in Folkwang Museum (Essen, 2019) and in mumok (Vienna, 2013). She has shown her work in Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art RIBOCA1 (Riga, 2018), Manifesta 9 (Genk, 2012) and at COSAR HMT gallery (Düsseldorf, 2021).
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The exhibition is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment and Tallinn Culture and Sports Department.
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