Born in Moscow, Margarita Gluzberg has lived and worked in London since 1979. Her practice ranges from drawing, usually on a gigantic scale, to performance, sound installation and most recently, photography and projection. From the subject of boxing, to the history of consumer culture and how it affects human relations, Gluzberg creates a visual territory from historical, autobiographical, and literary references. Her *Captive Bird Society *project, centred round early recordings of birdsong, generating a wider investigation into the story of phonography, and the apparatus of capture. Gluzberg's most recent photographic body of work, *The Consumystic *series, is a meditation on the mystical, ritual nature of material desire, weaving a mesh of consumer signs, spaces, and faces from the billboard. The camera acts as the interface between the consumer-voyeur, and the constantly changing, spectacular display of commodities. With reference to techniques used by the Surrealists, the images invoke an age when consumer fictions were being invented for the first time, but are returned to the present, a present where such fictions are becoming increasingly unsustainable.
