At this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin, WNTRP presents a collaboration between Louisa Clement & Studio Miessen.
In recent years, Louisa Clement repeatedly used mannequins in her photographic series in order to pose questions about real and simulated bodies. The frame of references ranges from Edgar Adget’s shopwindow photographs from the early twentieth century to more recent developments such as the genesis of the digital avatar at the last turn of the century. In both cases, a quite concrete “animation” – in the etymological sense – of the objects behind the window or the screen was at issue. In Clements recent series Avatar (2016), a mannequin of bright acrylic resin becomes a means to an end — a kind of placeholder – to interrogate forms of communication between avatars. In her new video series Not lost in you (2017) a hand touches this avatar in a very hesitant, tentative manner. The tight-fitting glove, however, prevents direct contact, any immediate sensory experience, and, in spite of the closeness and almost erotic interaction, ensures a clear and cool distance. Clement is interested here in the interface of the virtual and the real — the avatar can be in front of us, be touched, and yet a real reaction from it is impossible. Even the shaking of the mannequin is externally controlled.
In her series Fractures (2016), the artist takes up questions of identity formation. Everyday, humans construct their own identity and that of their opposites from different parts, and sometimes they make mistakes. In Fractures, we see curved and distorted body parts of mannequins that are sometimes put together wrongly, which symbolizes the construction of identities.
The exhibition design by Studio Miessen is conceived as a ‘background actor’. The focus here is on the complex relationship of the artist’s filmic works and its beholder, especially in regards to the relationship between space and the dynamic of the real and the precarious that opens up between corporeality and its digital projection in the age of artificial intelligence. Since the video works approximate the scale of the human body, the experience in this space is quite physical: the beholder is captures by the works and becomes a part of it. This direct interaction with the works then becomes a projection surface for the other beholders observing this. The abstract identity of the Fractures is thus further accelerated.
Louisa Clement (born 1987 in Bonn, Germany) lives and works in Bonn and Düsseldorf, Germany. From 2010 – 2014 she was a master student of Andreas Gursky at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she graduated in 2015.
