Hydroforce
2011 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
0:55 minutes
Liz Cohen
From among a cloud of fake smoke we see a heavily pregnant Cohen wearing a bikini and golden stilettos with lace-up straps wrapped around her legs, grasping onto the frame of a modified car as its loud hydraulic system clumsily moves it up and down. Pregnant with her first child at the time of the shooting of this video, the car featured in Hydroforce is an aging East German Trabant that the artist transformed into an American El Camino lowrider over the course of a decade, and which features in several of her works. Challenging the politics of the idealized and sexualized female body and the stylized car, Hydroforce establishes a metaphorical connection with her own identity: as a woman, a mother, laborer, and a migrant.
Liz Cohen is a photographer and performance artist best known for her project Bodywork , in which she transformed a German car into a lowrider while simultaneously transforming her own body, with the help of a fitness instructor, to become a bikini model at lowrider shows. Critical of a consumer based society and its use of the female body in advertisements and music videos, Bodywork was an avenue for Cohen to explore her own femininity and create dialogue around issues relating to immigration, nonconformity, and resistance. Some of her earlier works, consisting of black-and-white photographs and a series of performances, focused on similar issues, which she explored through documenting sex workers from the Panama Canal, as well as producing various portraits of an ostracised poet.
