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Waldburger Wouters is pleased to present its first cycle of a 4 weeks online film exhibition with Lin Yuqi, Elen Braga, Eli Cortiñas, and Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Lin Yuqi

I Am Always the Weak in Front of You
2015
5 minutes 15 seconds
Edition of 5 + 2AP

Lin Yuqi's video and installation works question the truth of the real world, including the truth about self and women’s identity in traditional social concepts. The artist uses images to write prose or poems, with symbolism techniques frequently used amongst. Her creative language is pure and powerful. The works boldly express the desire, restlessness, loneliness, and weakness in human nature, which makes Lin's work so very touching.


Lin Yuqi was born in Fuzhou, Fujian in 1994, graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2019 with a master's degree, and currently lives and works in Guangzhou.  Main exhibitions include Lin Yuqi: Room Theatre, Boxes Art Space, Shenzhen (2021); Under the Sign of Saturn, ShanghART M50, Shanghai (2020); Aksuru doesn't know what to dream of today,Boxes Art Museum,Shunde (2018); Lin Yuqi: Death Drive, Sapaki Space, Guangzhou (2017); Lin Yuqi: qfwfq,Shangh ART M50, Shanghai (2017); Lin Yuqi: Superficial Opinion, The Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts E7 space, Guangzhou (2015).

Elen Braga

Plataforma
2017
11 minutes 45 seconds

“Platform” is a performance/competition in which 42 women try to stay as long as possible on tiptoes. Aiming at a theoretically “fair” competition of strength and resistance, the artist uses the visual pattern of her body as a template and criterion for selecting her own competitors. To strictly conform to these parameters, the artist selects the participants using catalogs from modeling agencies. During the action, all model/participants wear the same homogeneously white lycra overalls – as soon as one of them gives up, she goes directly to an on-site photography studio where she chooses from a menu of 8 available poses – the pose that best suits her. The overall winner receives a customized book with 10 poses. However, the performance has no judge, thereby questioning the legitimacy of the competition itself and the position of the public as an observer who can also judge.


In “Platform”, the repetition of the same gesture and appearance emphasizes the instrumentalized, synthetic and mechanized aspects of the body in an attempt to reach a perfection that is never attained. In parallel, these repetitions together with the spectacularization of the action problematize the art performance as a liturgical game of acting, patience, resignation, and exhaustion. The performance is then seen as a structure that arises among other existing social constructions leaning into the absurd.


The first version of Platforma was held at SESC Belezinho, in São Paulo, and lasted approximately 5 hours.


Elen Braga is a Brazilian artist living in Belgium. Her first visual artwork was a performance in which she painted her entire body pink. Since then she has come a long way as a multidisciplinary visual artist in the fields of installation, sculpture, and public space. Her large-scale installations often accompany a performative aspect connected to the use of her own image. She challenges herself to work with new materials and techniques; sewing, ceramics, metal. Most of the time, her work is strongly concerned with the contexts of the places in which it is presented - historically, politically, culturally, and socially. At the same time, she plays with the paradoxes of materiality, trying to use different materials than those used in everyday life. The traditional Belgian stitch as a metal crown or a carpet as a monumental vertical installation flag in a public space.
She uses performance as a medium to investigate issues related to the individual subject’s strength, ambition, and resilience. Conceived, performed, and recorded in video, photography, objects, and diagrams, the focus is on the useless, absurd nature of these endeavors: allegories of insistence against the odds, confrontations against failure.

Elen Braga, Hand-tufted textiles, Acrylic wool and jute, 2021, 100 x 100 cm (each)

With the support of

​Since the late 60s, conceptual artist Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941 in Cleveland) has constantly been pushing the boundaries in art and continuously explored new territories. She already very early on worked on issues that later were regarded as key issues in contemporary art: Identity and construction of identity, the relationship between real and virtual world, the relationship between human beings and machines, surveillance of the individual, gender questions. 
    
Lynn Hershman Leeson has been an innovator in the use of various media and playfully discovered various media for her work and is acknowledged as a pioneer in New Media. Consequently, Hershman Leeson has been awarded the ZKM Siemens Media Art Price in 1995 and the d.velop digital art award (ddaa) for her lifetime achievement in Digital Art in 2010. In 2014, a major retrospective exhibition opened at ZKM in Karlsruhe and traveled to Harald Falckenberg Collection/Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2015) and Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg (2016). A vanguard exhibition on art and biotechnology was opened in 2018 in Basel at the HeK and for 2021 a solo show at the New Museum in New York is scheduled (opening June 30) 
    
Lynn Hershman Leeson is also a filmmaker and created four feature films, all of them having been shown at international film festivals as Berlinale, Sundance etc. In three of them, Tilda Swinton played the main role. In 2010, Lynn Hershman Leeson finished “Women Art Revolution”, a documentary film she has been working on for several decades. Women Art Revolution documents the emancipation of women in the art world in the United States. The film has been shown at Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, the Berlinale, at the MOMA in NY and many other venues.

Hershman Leeson’s work is, amongst others, in the collections of  the MOMA in New York and the MOMA in San Francisco, the Tate Modern in London, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Donald Hess Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center, and the Berkeley Art Museum.

"Eli Cortiñas most recent video, here presented in its first version, is about the politics of images and their social and political impact. Titled Not Gone With The Wind, the video adopts the form of a collage made of found sequences taken from Hollywood cinema, television series, advertising, Ted Talks and YouTube videos. The work owes its name to the almost eponymous 1939 civil war epic film, Gone with the Wind, which recently sparked a controversy after HBO Max temporarily pulled the film from its streaming service, for its racist depiction of black people. A simple, poetic addition, the “Not” appended to the original title, appears as a denunciation of the long Hollywood tradition which consists in representing toxic stereotypes, and getting away with it. As a result, the persistence in misrepresentation in mainstream cinema has contributed and still contributes to reinforce misleading historical narratives. In her video, the artist rightly asks “who owns the narrative”? In the era of fake news, Covid-fuelled conspiracy theories and global political uprisings, Cortiñas suggests that to save the future, one might have to re-asses the past. With a very precise succession of moving image sequences and quotes referring to the current regime of idea, the video reveals how fear and mass media's complicity reinforces hegemonic policies.”
 
Elise Lammer, September 2020


Eli Cortiñas, born 1979 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, lives and works in Berlin. A large part of Cortiñas’ practice revolves around the idea of challenging cinematic memory through analyzing and re-editing pre-existing footage, or her material. Disrupting and re-structuring narrative flows creates shifts of meaning (No Place Like Home, 2006). This method of ‘editing as writing’ generates a mixed feeling of both identification and alienation. In her videos and in her collages and object arrangements, Eli Cortiñas creates ambiguous and affirmative transparency – unveiling the role plays of a generation vaunted in the media as ‘lost’.

Eli Cortiñas studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and the European Film College Ebeltoft, Denmark. Selected solo exhibitions include Always bite the hand that feeds you at Convent Space for Contemporary Art, Ghent (2018), Remixers never die, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2018), Five Easy Pieces, and Some Words of Wisdom at Soy Capitán, Berlin (2015), Awkward Studies and a Decent Take on Serious Matters at Rokeby, London (2013), Love Is Worn Around The Neck, curated by Veit Loers at Kunstraum Innsbruck (2012). Her work was part of several group exhibitions, such as Büro komplex – Die Kunst der Artothek im politischen Raum, Kunsthaus NRW, Aachen (2018), Film Footage Fotografie. Bildnerische Augenblicke mit filmischen Bezügen, Museum for Photographie Braunschweig (2017), 10 Emerging Artists. Contemporary Experimental Films and Video Art from Germany, Goethe Institute Canada (2017), Double Feature, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2017), Les Rencontres Internationales at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011). Eli Cortiñas has been awarded with grants and fellowships from Berliner Senat (2017), Villa Sträuli (2017), Villa Massimo Rome (2014), Marianna Ingenwerth-Stiftung grant for residency at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo La Regenta (2013), Shortlist Award for young Film Art, Freunde der Neuen Nationalgalerie und Deutscher Filmakademie (2011), et al.
 

Good Ancestors
2020

single channel movie

2 minutes 59 seconds

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Eli Cortiñas

Not Gone With The Wind
2020

single channel video, 9 minutes

Edition of 5 + 2 AP

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