OVERVIEW

Luzie Meyer

Liste Year

Year of Birth

Country of Birth

Presented by

2020

1990

Germany

Sweetwater

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I recently explained to someone that when they first watched a film of Luzie’s that they would probably be confused. I didn’t mean it in a bad way, of course, but more that her work generates a sort of haze you can’t escape or a riddle you can’t solve; at the same time, it also hints that maybe if you just inspect a bit more thoroughly, or pay attention in a slightly different way, you might be able to figure out how to start unfolding it.

Incognito Ergo Non Sum, a new film produced specifically for an online context, takes as its starting point a typical artist interview. While a pseudo “new classical” soundtrack drives the rhythm of the interview, the dialogue devolves into a theater of absurdity, confounding the characters’ public, professional, and private lives as they explain strategies of personal image management. The film is filled with half-truths drawn from personal experiences and encounters (the paragraph above was adapted from part of the script, itself adapted from a prior text) scattered amongst falsehoods and ...

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Produced alongside Incognito Ergo Non Sum is a series of photographs, as seen in the film, depicting the amateur actors in the process of reading their scripts. (Maybe, then, they weren’t produced alongside the film but for the film, or even inside the film?) Using amateur actors is a staple of Luzie’s work; doing so somehow imparts a more genuine feeling to her films – we know the actors are acting, why bother hiding it – and counteracts the rigid nature of a script with the arbitrary nature of unskilled idiosyncrasy.

Many of these strategies were also used in Luzie’s last film, Simultan, part of her solo exhibition Duplicitous consent at the gallery last year. In the two-channel film, lookalike actresses are filmed in kitchens, reading a script on the loss of identity and burden of personal orientation, one in German, one in English. Inspiration for the film came, as with much of Luzie’s work, from literature, in this case Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story Simultan about a simultaneous translator. You can watch the film

  • Installation view, "Simultan" (2019)
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More of Luzie’s work can be found at her website here, and images of her solo exhibition at Sweetwater in 2019 can be seen here. Upcoming exhibitions include solo projects at Pogo Bar at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Fanta, Milan, as well as a collaborative project at Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg. She recently gave a live performance at Lenbachhaus, Munich, a recording of which, along with an interview, can be heard

The final part of our presentation relates to Liste’s artist project titled Rewriting Our Imaginations, in which an artist from each gallery was asked to produce a poster, the sales of which will help finance this very website. For this project, Luzie wrote a poem entitled Pin Up Hang Up, and submitted the poem in black Arial font on a white background as her poster. You can purchase the poster version through the fair website or inquire about the handmade version by getting in touch with us. The full text of the poem is below the following images.

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Pin Up Hang Up



I imagine a woman,
commissioned to produce a commodity,
an image to be reproduced indefinitely, for sale

—ad nauseam, ad absurdum—

a sale from which
she is not to benefit directly,
but indirectly (maybe),
a sale which might expose her, and lead to a significant depletion of self-esteem.

She feels a very real
sort of moral indebtedness— fearing that she might not be
a valuable investment in herself— but only outside herself,
in representation.

...