18.1 — 18.3 20
18.1 — 18.3 20
Through the constant use of writing in her video works and live performances, Schulman centres on how language affects individual and social bodies. As an expression of this the artist used the 🥴”woozy face” emoji as title of her show.
The written word or a formulated dialog is always the starting point. Producing filmed discourse, she shows the effect that material and immaterial economies have on all of us. Through her technique of talking directly to the camera while walking in crowded city centres or while performing in abandoned suburban areas, she is addressing the viewer upfront, and her audience is compelled to enter a work that demands a response.
Voices of desire that interweave post-colonialism, aesthetics, money and finance, politics, psychology and sexuality create what one could call an international subconscious awareness of capitalism. The languages spoken in her videos stem from Swedish, English and French to Hebrew and Spanish. And what this international stream of words and images binds together is not only the alienation of the contemporary individual in his or her desperate search for sense, but also that in our helpless search for meaning, we know and reveal in our action and behaviour much more than we are willing to admit.
There is a kind of concrete knowledge that all her characters embody. In the video works on show in A plus A Gallery like Polis-Polis (2018), swedish police officers are talking about their uniforms, about their sexuality, religion and work. And in L’Obstruction (2018) that presents itself as an educational speech in public spaces, the actor encounters great difficulty addressing even a single person while performing a blocked educational speech in french with exhausting effects on his body. Also on show will be a new film about the south american customs officer Aduaneras and new drawings by the artist prepared for this exhibition.
Cornerstone of the exhibition in A plus A Gallery in Venice will be the artist’s newest video Le Goubernement. Six episodes about the destiny and work of women, lesbian, queer, trans and non-binary artists who lived in Paris from 1910 – 1980. The episodes traverse and overlay over 70 years of history and reveal the stories and fates of artists that were erased from the great twentieth century modernist narrative.
As often in her work, Liv Schulman does not elaborate a linear, rational, logical story — rather, the artist proposes a collective construction of the characters that is the result of the process of practice, during the shooting. Through a fictional historical revision, Le Goubernement undermines the official narratives of the triumphalist histories.
Liv Schulman was born in 1985 and she grew up in Buenos Aires. She now lives and works in Paris. She studied art practice and art writing at the ENSAPC de Paris-Cergy, the Goldmisths University of London, and the Lyon Post-Diploma. She is the winner of the 20th Prize Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, awarded on the occasion of the exhibition The Twentieth Fondation d’entreprise Ricard Prize, curated by Neïl Beloufa in September 2018.
Her works have been shown and performed at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2019), Centre Pompidou Paris (2019), Ricard Foundation (2018), Reina Sofia, Madrid (2018), Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille (2018), Galerie Noisy-le-Sec (2017), Sixty Eight art Institute, Copenhagen (2017) and the Biennale de Rennes (2016). Liv Schulman is a recipient of the Cité internationale des arts Visual Arts Committees and recipient of the 2018 Ricard Corporate Foundation Award.