Lynn Hershman Leeson

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Impersonal Politics
Category
Exhibition Review
Date
Jun 14, 2018
Source
Berlin Art Link
Author
William Kherbek
Excerpt

The management and control of identity, and the distribution of personality and agency, have been subjects of Hershman Leeson’s work since she began making “videotapes” more than four decades ago, and ‘First Person Plural’ does an excellent job of drawing connections between the earlier and later works, highlighting the ways in which Hershman Leeson has evolved in order to remain the same artist with the same set of concerns. The first room of the exhibition, housed in an abandoned warehouse complex near the Moritzplatz U-Bahn station, is oddly homely, emphasizing the ways in which technologies and personalities interact. Hershman Leeson deftly explores the ways in which agency is often subsumed within the deceptive performance of “making choices.” In the Cold War America of Hershman Leeson’s earlier works, for example, the ability to make choices, particularly consumer choices, was a way of distinguishing Western societies from those…

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