Opening: 18 May 2018, 7 pm
Located in a large abandoned warehouse in the middle of Berlin-Kreuzberg, KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents the exhibition First Person Plural by American artist Lynn Hershman Leeson (born 1941, Cleveland, US), which brings together selected video works from the 1970s-90s as well as the installation Lorna (1979-83).
The focus of the exhibition lies on Hershman Leeson’s continuous engagement with identity, gender construction, sexual self-determination, and her progression of these ideas in close exchange with advances in technology, and science. The work challenges our relationship to reality and the possibilities that virtual reality, artificial intelligence as well as genetics are made accessible as a strategy of resistance. By doing so, she defies the limitation of censorship and elimination of the individual voice while also recognizing the dangers inherent in the question, who controls these new technologies.
The title of the show is pulled from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film First Person Plural, the Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman (1984-96) that sits at the center of the exhibition. In the form of a video confessional amassed over 12 years, the film records Hershman Leeeson’s struggle, transformation, and transcendence as her personal story unfolds before the camera and sees the mirroring effects of when the personal becomes political, becomes cultural.
Curator: Anna Gritz
Assistant curator and project management: Cathrin Mayer