Melanie Gilligan

Place: Toronto

Born: 1979

Biography:

Melanie Gilligan is a Canadian artist born in Toronto in 1979. She currently lives and works in London and New York. Gilligan completed her B.A. (Hons) in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London in 2002 and was a Fellow with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Programme from 2004 to 2005. Her work spans various media including video, performance, text, installation, and music, examining relationships between politics, aesthetics, and their political economy. Recent exhibitions include Presentation House Gallery in Vancouver (2010), Banff Centre in Alberta (2010), Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany, Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland (2008), and Franco Soffiantino Gallery in Turin, Italy (2009). In 2008, she released Crisis in the Credit System, a four-part fictional mini drama about the recent financial crisis, made specifically for internet viewing and distribution, commissioned and produced by Artangel Interaction. She has also realized a single screen film Self-capital (2009), commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts London as part of the group exhibition Talk Show. Critical writing is part of her practice, and she has contributed to art magazines and journals such as Texte zur Kunst and Artforum. In 2009, Gilligan was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.