Over the last four decades, Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. She is recognized for innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Her five feature films—Conceiving Ada (1997), Teknolust (2003), Strange Culture (2009), !Women Art Revolution: A Secret History (2012), and Tania Libre (2017)—are all in worldwide distribution and have screened at the Sundance, Toronto, and Berlin film festivals, among others. Her art is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, SFMOMA, Tate Modern, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Center, where it will be featured in the Spring 2018 exhibition The Body Electric. A new commission, a film and 3D installation titled Vertighost opens at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco on December 16. 2017.
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#METOO & #NOTSURPRISED
There is no moment this year that equals the #metoo or #notsurprised. It is a watershed moment, but times like this do not happen over night. The slow drips of over a century flooded into the generation of women now who, feeling empowered and confident, organized their activism and resistance into formations of networked power.
In a way, it is a tribute to the work we did in the ’70s, the four decades of consciousness-raising and fighting for political justice and equality that, in my opinion, launched this moment.
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THE FLAVOR GENOME AT THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL
Anicka Yi’s The Flavor Genome , a dimensional experience with this 3D film, was featured in the Whitney Biennial. Exquisitely shot, and featuring a narrative of rare poignancy, this work is so rare and entrancing that it enriches and underscores the usually invisible motivations of all living things.
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LIFE IS CHEAP AT THE GUGGENHEIM
Anicka Yi’s exhibition for the Hugo Boss Award at the Guggenheim was a completely original imagining of migratory patterns and unexpected paths all living things gravitate to as they create a path towards survival. A singular and strong voice, Yi’s art invents a not before seen intervention between invented and living forms that grow, mutate and evolve into their display.
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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: AMONG FRIENDS
The MoMA exhibition so aptly and uniquely stressed both his use of all media and his collaborations with dancers, media artists, and scientists, among others. His fearlessness elevated interactive perceptions that created delightful and deeply charged possibilities for infinite recombinations of both form and meaning.
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APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL’s CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR
Cemetery of Splendor, made in 2015 but shown in San Francisco in 2017, is a meditation on the condition of persistent sleep, wakeful dreaming, and insomnia. Weerasethakul’s overlays between magic and reality underscore the temptations available to us that often go unseen and become fervent warnings to what happens it we are not fully awake or only partly conscious.
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MARTINE SYMS AT MOMA
Projects 106: Martine Syms in the project room at MoMA articulates an original and rigorous examination of the narratives of blackness in a revisionist rendering of once-radical traditions. Syms revises expectation and uses apps to aptly delve beneath the surface of expectation and exploitation. The exhibition itself can be explored directly with the artist herself in this “How to See” tour.
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