Les Garçons Sauvages, 2008
installation view at KW Institute

–

Interpretation, 2010
installation view at Kunsthalle, Basel

–

Interpretation, 2010
installation view at  1m³, Lausanne

–

Structures de pouvoir, rituels et sexualité chez les sténodactylos européennes, 2010
Costume for performance – with child, 2008
Abacost! (and detail), 2007
Black Mariah (The Dancers’ Objects), 2008

–

Black Mariah (The Twins’ Performance Objects), 2009
installation view at Centre d’art du parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux

–

Invisible, 2010
Untitled 2011, Black & white photographs
Some Objects Blackened (white shirt with make-up, number 5 and number 6), 2011

–

–

Untitled, 2011
installation view at Karma International, Zürich

all images courtesy of the artist, the gallery Kamel Mennour, Paris and Mary Mary, Glasgow

–

After studying ballet and law before pursuing art criticism, LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR made her first art works in 2005. Since then her body of work has become quickly larger including several sculptures, performances, films and drawings.

She often conceives her installations as sets for performances, which are either presented live for the audience or staged for video recordings that are later incorporated into exhibitions. Her installations might include sculptures, texts, visual signs and photographs – but also musicians and actors, whose expressivity is limited and who often play the roles of speakers as they read texts aloud: I position the characters as I might place objects, to the point that one could say that girls are painted and the objects are wearing too much makeup.

LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR’s projects have explored the beginnings of cinema (Black Mariah, 2009), the life and works of Sottsass (In Every Room There is the Ghost of Sex, 2008), the obsolete knowledge of shorthand-typists (The Power Structures, 2009–10), and former slave communities in 19th-century Jamaica (The Center and The Eyes, 2006):

I act within the context of contemporary art: a place for representations, signs, symbols, amongst other things. I am interested in disrupting the mechanisms of assimilation between an artist’s production and his or her cultural identity, and the commodification of so-called ‘authenticity’. More than hybridizing various cultural signs, which seems too much of a way to capitalize on an accumulation of possibilities and interpretations, I want to find productive ways of reversing those identification terms, subtilizing one with another, or mirroring them. I tack between key figures of my own biography (when I work with my mother and my grandmother) and figures that are very remote from myself (like Sun Ra, who called himself an extra-terrestrial) as a way to define a place that resists assimilation and that allows, to a certain extent, a construction of the self through art (however old-fashioned this may sound). I am an awkward impostor. My construction is full of blind spots, mistakes, misappropriations, that I use in order to understand the complex histories of domination, marginality, and separation. – LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR in conversation with CHRIS SHARP

And good news: LILI REYNAUD-DEWAR‘s work is currently on view at Mary Mary Gallery in Glasgow until January 14, 2012