Ligia Lewis

We hold where study takes a choreographic approach to image-making and mourning. The film enacts a series of duets, both within and between images, featuring choreography by boychild with Josh Johnson and by Ligia Lewis with Jonathan Gonzalez, both to original music by Bendik Giske. The work is rooted in Tsang’s ongoing dialogue with collaborators Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, authors of The Undercommons, and in particular on their recent essay Leave Our Mics Alone, which posits an (im)possible set of images of resistance, through poetic notions of blackness (and/or transness and/or queerness) as an improvisational mode of being, in common with others, working through and of the environment.

Ligia Lewis filmed A Plot, A scandal in the historic quarters of Rimini, Italy, a site the artist sees as upholding “Eurocentric ideals of (white) Man’s dominion over the land.” One recurring aspect of the landscape, the towering cypress trees in ordered rows, stands as an example. The film opens with the sonic resonance of the church bell portrayed later as a towering monument, pointing to Christian ideals that served as both a precursor to the Enlightenment and bedfellow in maintaining this hierarchical order. Weaving together multiple historical epics with political and mythical narratives, the work uses ideas of spectacle and scandal to address the continued dispossession of “Europe’s Others,” as Lewis describes them. [Overview courtesy of The Whitney Museum]

Body in Plural moves between bodies and buildings to trace how a single historic event continues to reverberate through time. From a 1988 mass performance in Yugoslavia to today's protests in Serbia, the film questions how freedom can still be imagined, not as possession, but as relation.