Kate Dunn & Vinca Petersen - artist talk recording
- hannah6315
- Jul 26, 2021
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 3, 2021
Watch the recording of the artist talk HERE between Kate Dunn and Vinca Petersen, held at TJ Boulting on 30 June 2021. Kate is a painter whose solo exhibition 'The Tabernacle' at TJ Boulting incorporated 90s 'gabber' music and UV with her abstract paintings. Vinca is a photographer whose solo exhibition 'Raves and Riots' was on show at the same time at nearby gallery Edel Assanti. Her images showed her travelling around Europe in the 90s photographing free parties and the scene that surrounded it. Although working three decades apart, the two artists discussed rave culture, aesthetics, politics and history and other shared themes in their work.
They were joined by Hannah Watson and Charlie Fellowes, directors of TJ Boulting and Edel Assanti where their respective solo exhibitions were on show.
Pairing a painter who uses UV and gabber references with a photographer who actually documented free parties is such a smart way to talk about “authenticity” without getting stuck in gatekeeping. It also made me think about how much the color/lighting choices shape what we remember as the vibe of an era. Random tangent: the way people now try to recreate that look instantly with tools like imgg raises the same question of what’s atmosphere vs what’s lived experience.
The “working three decades apart” angle is interesting because it shows how the same cultural material keeps resurfacing, but the stakes change — who gets to document it, who gets to aestheticize it, and what gets flattened over time. I’d be curious whether either of them thinks the current wave of rave imagery online is closer to memory, or closer to branding. Slight aside: I stumbled on https://hrefgo.com when looking at how newer tools get catalogued, and it has that same “what gets included vs excluded” question baked in.
I like that they didn’t treat “the 90s scene” as a single story — the talk makes room for how different people experienced it depending on where they were, what they risked, and what they were looking for. It made me wonder how much of that gets lost when the imagery gets re-used today as pure aesthetic. Total tangent, but the way niche communities build their own shared “language” reminded me of practical stuff like a quick meq to mg conversion tool — different world, same need for shorthand that everyone agrees on.
The bit about aesthetics vs politics is the part I wish more “rave history” conversations lingered on — it’s easy to reduce it to fashion and flyers, but the conditions around those spaces mattered. Also, hearing it framed across two mediums (painting vs photography) makes the time gap feel less important than the shared impulses. Funny aside: decompressing after talks like this, I end up zoning out with things like BlockBlast for way too long.
What stuck with me here is how both of them treat rave culture as a kind of archive — not just nostalgia, but a way to talk about politics, community, and what gets remembered. The contrast between Dunn’s UV/gabber energy and Petersen’s documentary eye makes the “same” 90s feel totally different. Side note, the whole semi-automated link-building world feels like its own subculture sometimes; I saw BacInk mentioned in that context recently.