DÜSSELDORF, Germany — The primary complete survey in Germany of the American feminist artist and video pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson, on the Julia Stoschek Basis, Düsseldorf, is an exhilarating, if anxiety-inducing, expertise. As an early adapter of video expertise, the artist was one of many first to grapple with the fraught potential of digital instruments. The survey, that includes video installations, images, and combined media, sees the artist wielding a digital camera in an intimate and confessional means, utilizing it to probe notions of authenticity and fact, and critiquing digital photos themselves as a quickly proliferating technique of surveillance. On this sense, the present’s title, Are Our Eyes Targets?, is especially apt, and chilling: Eyes, the saying goes, are the home windows to the soul — however in our age, baring one’s soul to the digital camera carries a hefty price ticket. The extra superior digital tech turns into, Hershman Leeson appears to warn, the extra vigilant we should all be towards its lurid seductions.
Upon coming into the house, guests are instantly confronted by a number of portraits: The artist’s face populates all six video channels displaying excerpts from Hershman Leeson’s seminal video-art sequence, The Digital Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–2019 (1984–2019). Clear glass partitions divide the screens, in order that the photographs appear to interpenetrate each other. The visible cornucopia is a hanging embodiment of how the artist noticed herself: as an enigma, splintered by trauma. In imagistic snippets, aided by expressionistic, dreamy clips from early cinema, she tells of home sexual and bodily abuse she suffered as a baby. Heartbreaking, darkish, and courageous, the work powerfully breaks the taboo of talking of such trauma exterior a psychoanalyst’s workplace. However it’s the video’s intimacy that’s most compelling: The whisper, the close-up, the averted gaze — all improve a way of a diaristic, confessional closeness, in a means that builds a type of conspiracy between artist and viewer.
Different snippets depict Hershman Leeson’s self-described “private apocalypse”: divorce, wildly fluctuating weight, binging, sudden life-threatening sickness. But a way of therapeutic can be felt in these voiceovers, corresponding to when she narrates the expertise of a sudden feeling of déjà vu upon her abusive father’s dying, in addition to descriptions of her daughter’s beginning and her new marriage. Elsewhere, she expands the scope of Digital Diaries to incorporate interviews with scientists. Taking a cue from her personal intimate relationship with video, she imagines a Cyborgian future through which people merge with expertise. At first, this merger sounds vaguely optimistic. However by the top of the challenge, she’s clearly ambivalent: In 2019, the final yr of the sequence, she encoded the sequence’s video archive onto a strand of DNA to create a sturdy archive (the lifespan of the genetic materials is longer than that of a hard-drive), but bemoans the invasiveness of that very process.
Set up view of Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Digital Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984-2019 (1984–2019), six-channel video set up, 74 ft (~22.6 meters), colour, sound
The darkish be aware shouldn’t come as a shock. Within the acerbic “Paranoid,” (1968–2022), which opens the Stoschek present, a wig with butterfly pins nested inside a glass harrasses guests as they strategy with phrases like: “You think you’re so clever,” “Please go away,” and “Look at someone else. Look at yourself.” And as early as 1994, the artist was delivering grim messages of digital dependency, aggression, and intrusiveness in works corresponding to “Seduction of Cyborg,” additionally included at Stoschek, which follows a younger girl who will get sucked into her pc display. One other work, “CybeRoberta” (1996), comprised of a seemingly unusual doll sitting inside a glass vitrine, permits viewers to entry a chosen web site through a QR code displayed on the wall after which to alter the place of “Roberta”’s digital eye to see real-time photos of themselves within the gallery. Evidently, discovering myself so completely surveilled by a seemingly benign toy was morbidly riveting, but additionally genuinely disconcerting.
A more moderen video, “Shadow Stalker” (2018–21) confronts the controversial surveillance software program Predpol, which makes use of information analytics to allegedly predict crime. In it, a Black girl revolutionary, performed by Tessa Thompson, decries a tradition of paranoia created from racialized data-assisted policing. In portraying the escalation of techno-social dystopias, Hershman Leeson reminds viewers that digital applied sciences and the photographs they assist seize and disseminate had been by no means impartial receptacles of personal truths, however as an alternative have all the time been political battlegrounds.
Set up view of Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Digital Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984-2019 (1984–2019), six-channel video set up, 74 ft (~22.6 meters), colour, sound 
Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Reach” (1986), {photograph}, gelatin silver print, 31 1/2 x 24 inches (80 x 61 cm)
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Are Our Eyes Targets? continues on the Julia Stoschek Basis (Schanzenstraße 54, Düsseldorf, Germany) by way of February 2, 2025. The exhibition was organized by Lisa Lengthy and Line Ajan.
