Look A Doll! – My Mother’s Story;
Tuesday, 22 October 2013 from 17:15 to 18:45
New Hall Art CollectionIntroduced by Liliane Lijn and Gill Hedley
Liliane Lijn is a prominent American-born artist who was the first woman artist to work with kinetic text (Poem Machines), exploring both light and text as early as 1962. Utilising highly original combinations of industrial materials and artistic processes, Lijn is recognised for pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and female mythology. Lijn is particularly known for her timeless, cone-shaped Koan series – Black Koan (2000) was donated to the New Hall Art Collection in 2002. In conversation with Fluxus artist and writer, Charles Dreyfus, Lijn stated that she primarily chose to ‘see the world in terms of light and energy’.
Lijn has been shortlisted for the 2014/15 Fourth Plinth Commissions.
From the early 1980s, Lijn began to develop a new female archetype, using a broad range of materials, media and new technologies, referencing mythological beings and merging them with images from both nature and industry. Working with the feminine archetype led Lijn to see memory as a labyrinth and she began to conduct what she called ‘a dialogue with Self’. Guy Brett wrote about the video sculptures she made while working on Look A Doll:
‘Perhaps you are grappling here with time, and the way in which the scale of the sculpture, in relation to our own scale, and our memories, both personal and cosmic, can evoke the dimension of time. The distant through the intimate…’
Look a Doll! – My Mother’s Story (1998 – 2000) explores Lijn’s mother’s childhood in Russia and Poland, using interviews, photomontage and archive film clips. Extending the autobiographical theme developed in Lijn’s book – Her Mother’s Voice – the film depicts the reality of family life of a Jewish woman born into the 20th Century in the years leading up to the Holocaust. An enactment of oral tradition between generations and between mother and daughter, it is about ‘the restlessness of the rootless, those who have lost everything, even and most painfully their past’.
62 minutes shot on Sony digital video, edited on Beta SP
Camera: John Bulmer, Editor: Michael Franks, Rostrum Camera: Ken Morse
Made with the financial aid of the London Production Fund
Huntingdon Road
CB3 0DF Cambridge
United Kingdom