Spooky things are happening at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. A woman sits on a bench and looks at the painting of a woman who resembles her except for her carefully styled hair – or is it the other way around? Another painting remains locked away for years until it is checked for authenticity one last time and thereupon appears on a wall – but does that change anything about the picture? How fictional is the man who in the movie “Vertigo” forms a woman after his ideals, and how much of his persona is modeled after the actual director Alfred Hitchcock? What does actually constitute the authenticity of a painting and what the identity of a person? Lynn Hershman Leeson has been engaged with such issues for decades, and with her latest project “VertiGhost” she revisits ideas that are scarily topical in times of Twitterbots, virtual face recognition, and big data… FULL ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Widewalls