Véronique Bourgoin is a visual artist born in Marseille, France.
She lives and works between Montreuil and Marseille (France) and Albisola (Italy).
She graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1991.
In 2023, she was named a *Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres* (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters).
Véronique Bourgoin’s practice typically begins with experiments involving the photographic medium, subsequently extending into a variety of other media such as ceramics, publishing, drawing, painting, video, and installation. The experimental nature of her work unfolds through the manipulation of physical, chemical, and psychological elements, highlighting the transformative effects of vision and imagination—specifically, spectacular effects within « counter-spectacular » contexts where the intimate and the simulacrum intertwine.
Drawing inspiration from her background and daily life as well as from political, technological, and historical contingencies, Bourgoin examines the construction of « contemporary paradises. » Her work is grounded in recurring questions regarding materiality, the body, living things, and identity—and how these are represented amidst the conflicts of our time.
Early in her career, the artist established an international network of collaborations with numerous other artists. These collaborations flourished through *Atelier Reflexe* (1995–2016)—an experimental photography school co-founded with Juli Susin—and through a project initiated with Susin in 1989 centered on the creation of artist’s books. From the 2000s onwards, this project evolved into an international collaborative platform for artist’s books, known more recently as *Royal Book Lodge*. In 2005, Bourgoin created *The Hole Garden*, a collective identity bringing together friends and serving as the basis for performance art, films, and photographic series.
Véronique Bourgoin has participated in numerous exhibitions at international institutions and festivals, such as the Bibliothèque nationale de France (2023–24); Fotohof, Salzburg (2000, 2004, 2007, 2015, 2021–22); Performa, New Museum, New York (2019); Landskrona Photo Festival, Sweden (2013); Fotomuseum, Rotterdam (2013); Tütün Deposu Ek bina, Istanbul (2011); Caochangdi Photospring Festival, China (2010); LA Art Center, Los Angeles (2009); Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, Brazil (2009); Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2005); Maison d’Art Bernard Anthonioz, Paris (2006–07); Thessaloniki Photography Biennale, Greece (2010); and the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Curitiba Biennial, Brazil (2013).

Royal Book Lodge (RBL) emergerged from a collaboration between the artists Juli Susin and Véronique Bourgoin between Paris and Berlin at the end of the 1980s. Since 2000, this initiative has been supported by their friend Yasha Gofman. Its modus operandi is a creation of books that enable a dialogue between artists and synthesizes experimentations with different media as painting, sculpture, photography, film, installations, ceramics, writing.

 

The Royal Book Lodge catalog features a list of over forty artists’ books, produced over a period of thirty years. Often limited editions with elaborate designs, each book, produced in close collaboration with the artist, uses exacting printing techniques, and offers innovative stagings of images, texts, and sometimes objects, creating hybrid forms between book, sculpture, and artifact.

 

Behind the classic bibliophile appearance is a contrarian initiative: deluxe bindings are effectively a camouflage for the circulation of subversive or illicit content, a concept inflected by the culture of samizdat and improvisation; the cultivation of paradoxical relations between time and history; coupled with the imaginative projection of parallel worlds; diversionary tactics and the use of alter-personae, stand-ins, elaborate fictions, and name changes (CNE, Prager Kreis, Fabrique des Illusions, Silverbridge, Magnet River).

 

The name “Royal Book Lodge” itself, transfers the quizzically metaphorical notion of “royal” – long associated with street and rock cultures where it posed as a contrarian cipher for sovereignty and magnificence – to the medium of the book, which is elevated, “royally” as it were, among other artistic mediums. The “Lodge” refers primarily to the idea of a grand communitarian workshop governed, if regulated at all, by its own spatial and temporal laws – akin to those developed in underground culture, science fiction, and the historical and neo-avant-gardes as the Situationist International or conceptual artists from Los Angeles.

 

The editorial foundations of Royal Book Lodge inspired by the Black Sun editions created by Caresse and Harry Crosby in the 1920s, have been developed in Paris since the beginning of the 1990s, relying on the know-how of great book artisans such as Arte, printing company founded by Aimé Maeght in 1932.

 

If Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, where various African, Portuguese and Eastern European communities meet, is the geographical area where the collaborations were born, the activities of RBL have expanded into larger projects and have generated for more than 30 years, a porous but a distractedly nimble network of artists from France, Germany, Eastern European, United States, Iceland, Paraguay, Mali and other locations.

 

Royal Book Lodge has made publishing a collaborative process that transcends the physical reality of the book and generates unexpected and surprising correspondences, which unpack questions caught up in various constructs of our time related to ‘materiality’ and dissolution, autobiographical structures and mythological encodings, fiction and reality, human and inhuman, violence and art’s potential as a pharmacological first aid kit.

 

Both a study and a guidance tool, the first book on Royal Book Lodge by renowned art historian John C. Welchman, was published by Hatje Cantz in the fall of 2023, examining for the first time the contribution of RBL to an array of art.