Lynn Hershman Leeson
Lynn Hershman Leeson Women Artists in KADIST’s and Videobrasil’s Collections An Online Video Exhibition streaming at videobrasil.online from September 27–November 28, 2021 From early on, the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson (1941, Cleveland, USA) anticipated the impact of technological developments on our lives and has explored how women’s identities are coded and decoded by them. Through interactive installations, videos, films, networks, photography, drawings, performance, and other media, she has delved into different topics that have become central in her work, such as the shifting construction of the public and private, “real” and “fictitious” selves, feminism, artificial intelligence, and more recently, DNA programming. Significantly for this exhibition, Hershman Leeson’s work has at times examined her own autobiography, “the story of a body with more minds than it knows what to do with, or of a mind manifesting through several bodies,” as Meredith Tromble would put it ( Double Talk , 201). This exhibition gathers six video works by Hershman Leeson that more directly address the experience of womanhood and the violence and trauma it entails. The presentation also calls attention to the performative nature of gender through the technologies of representation available at different times during the four decades that span these works. In the midst of all this, the question of women in art emerges with vigor, as we experience the marginalization and invisibility she and her colleagues have experienced. Feminism thus underlays the selection of works. The Hotel Rooms Commercials (1974) is an advertisement Hershman Leeson did for a project that took place in three hotel rooms around New York City. The work threaded a narrative that linked three women to the three hotel rooms where visitors could find traces of their existence—breaking into their private space—that were at the same time idiosyncratic to the neighborhoods where the hotels stood. This transit between the public and the private characterized much of Hershman Leeson’s work at the time. The advertisements were “electronic haiku that could, in less than a minute, impart the essence of the event ” (Hershman Leeson, 34). They, as well as serving their more obvious purpose of showcasing different people introducing themselves as “Lynn Hershman,” also reflected her preoccupation with the multiplication of the self and the different personas that might inhabit it. The artist further explored this subject between 1973 and 1978 through the character of Roberta Breitmore, an alter ego of Hershman Leeson that she has defined as a “ private performance done in public.” Breitmore navigated the reality of a single woman exposed to a patriarchal society: she saw a psychiatrist, had a bank account, and a driver’s license. Here we include the video Lynn Becoming Roberta (1974) in which we see the transformation from one character to the other, carefully codified by Hershman Leeson not only with regard to her make-up, but the gestures and language Breitmore used. B Files (1998) continues the examination of Breitmore’s existence through the archives left after her physical disappearance, speculating how her life was lived in and outside of institutions. One of Hershman Leeson’s more important works is First Person Plural: The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman, 1984-1996 (1996) , a titanic enterprise of self-revelation. In it, she unveils the violence and abuse she suffered as a child, re-lived through abandonment and self-deprecation as an adult. This archaeology of the self offers some kind of redemption, as the editing of the footage also reveals an acute mind analyzing her life’s journey as an offering of some form of healing. Another major work included in this exhibition is the documentary film ¡ Women Art Revolution (2010) , the culmination of forty years of documenting the feminist art movement in the USA. The film is an engaging manifesto by Hershman Leeson and her colleagues who endured all sorts of discrimination as women artists. Through their different approaches to art practice, they opened up platforms to launch fierce critiques of patriarchal structures in the art world and developed radical unapologetic artworks that did not care for the traditional male-dominated art criticism. The construction of characters, both in life and fiction—a topic that has interested Hershman Leeson since the beginning of her practice—continues in one of her more recent films, VertiGhost (2017) . A critical re-interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), the film follows ghosts of different kinds, the remains left by people and objects that keep haunting the present: “Ghosts of each era wander in a purgatory of unexposed secrets and refuse to rest until their stories are told. ” This exhibition is a collaboration between Videobrasil and KADIST. We would like to thank Lynn Hershman Leeson. Women Artist’s in KADIST’s and Videobrasil’s collections is a six-month collaboration between KADIST and Videobrasil consisting of three exhibitions that delve into the work of women artists who explore specific ways of creating moving images from situated perspectives. Spanning diverse sensibilities, methodologies, and media, the works consider different ways of approaching art practice, knowledge, and the relation to the present from clearly feminist stands, affirming the agency of art as a transformative force. Founded by Solange O. Farkas, the Associação Cultural Videobrasil carries out curatorial projects and research with a focus on the audiovisual production of the geopolitical South. Its projects draw on Videobrasil’s Collection of artworks, publications, and documents amassed since the first edition of the Videobrasil Contemporary Art Festival in 1983, during which Brazil – and most of Latin America – was under a military regime. Founded in 1990, the Videobrasil Collection features roughly 1,700 works from the Global South. The collection constitutes an inestimable wellspring for research, which is marked by the use of the video medium for political, combative, and liberational purposes.