LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina & Air de Paris, Romainville, Grand Paris - Dialogue -
Hanne Lippard, Pati Hill
For Art-o-rama, LambdaLambdaLambda and Air de Paris are playing a little game, a game of meeting and sharing.
Hanne Lippard (represented by LLL) will select some of Pati Hill’s (represented by ADP) works to be presented with her own.
All the works will be presented on a single wall, a shared vertical territory.
Pati Hill (1921, Ashland, Kentucky – 2014, Sens, France) left behind an artistic output spanning roughly 60 years and encompassing various disciplines. Untrained as an artist, she began to use the photocopier as an artistic tool in the early 1970s and continued to do so until her death, leaving behind an extensive oeuvre that explores the relationship between image and text. In addition to this comprehensive body of xerographic work, she published four novels, a memoir, several short stories, artists books, and poetry. Drawing also became an essential part of her practice.
By using the copier—a machine that was stereotypically linked to secretarial work and thus to feminized labor—to trace everyday objects such as a comb, a carefully folded pair of men’s trousers, or a child’s toy, Hill developed an artistic practice that programmatically translated invisible domestic labor into a visual and public language. Through her use of this reproductive apparatus, she created a model of artistic production that critically opposes the convention of individual expression as well as the supposed neutrality of technologically produced images.
Pati Hill has been exhibited in museum shows such as Electroworks, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1984); Electra, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1984); L’Electrographie, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1980); La Photocopie, Musée d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1980) amongst others.
Recently she had solo shows at Arcadia University, PA, Glenside (2016); Air de Paris, Romainville (2020); Kunstverein, München (2020, travelled to Kunsthalle Zürich, 2021); Treize, Paris (2021). She will be part of L’Image et son double at the Photography Gallery at the Centre Pompidou in November 2021 (cur. Julie Jones).
She is part of the Whitney Museum of American Art collection, FRAC Île-de-France and Centre Pompidou.
Hanne Lippard has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last ten years, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture. The artist has developed a practice that lies at the confluence of spoken and written word, wherein she appropriates content from the public sphere, chiefly from online sources or from the field of advertising, to investigate how the rise in digital communication and mediation is reprogramming our relationship to language. Lippard intertwines found text with her own material, which she then manipulates through a variety of devices, such as repetition, the shifting of intonation, or the exploitation of homonyms, in order to formulate musings on contemporary life.
She draws upon themes including questions of bodily and mental wellbeing, self-optimization, and living through the lens of social media. By consciously picking at the seams of her found and fabricated texts, Lippard makes us acutely aware of the fragility of language as a tool for conveying meaning and sense. She exposes its flaws, its oddities, its double entendres, and its potential for misinterpretation through series of calmly obsessive utterances that bear an affinity to the iconoclastic literary experiments of the Dada movement.
Hanne Lippard’s on-going series of curses reinterpret Roman curse tablets. The original curse tablets were generally created in the 2nd-4th centuries AD. by voiceless, provincial, non-citizens, women or slaves, – those whose speech did not count and who saw themselves relegated to the symbolic confines of the empire. While these tablets promised vengeance, they provided, above all, a release for psychological strain, like the platforms of expression offered by social media today.
For the first series, Curse I-XIII (2018), the artist has composed thirteen tablets as variations on the theme of resentment and malevolence. These revenge letters, that the artist sees as much as parodies as visual poems, provide a humorous commentary on the various topics related to her research. Another series, Echo Curses XX-XXV (2021), reflect on the digital challenge of being stuck in digital loops, losing one’s login-password, not being recognised as a human by the captcha puzzle, and other delightful digital cursed moments. The use of the word and phenomenon Echo in this series refers both to the online echo chamber, particularly found within social media, and the myth of Narcissus and Echo. In this myth Echo undergoes a physical transformation when she is rejected by Narcissus and disintegrates into a disembodied voice unable to repeat anything but the voice and words of others, losing her integrity as well as her physical body, as it often happens to bodies when they appear online. The mirrored backgrounds can be seen as visual reverberations, extensions of the parallel self.
Hanne Lippard (Norwegian) born in 1984 in Milton Keynes (GB) lives in Berlin.
Her most recent solo-exhibitions include MuHKA, Antwerp (2021); Furiosa, Monaco (2021); LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina (2019); Goethe Pop Up Institute, Minneapolis (2019); Kunsthall Stavanger (2018); FriArt, Fribourg; SALTS, Basel, (2017) and KW, Berlin (2017).
Most recently her work was featured in group-exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021); Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou (2020-21); Air de Paris, Romainville (2020), RIBOCA 2, Riga Biennale, Riga (2020); Musee d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne – Chateau de Rochechouart, Rochechouart (2020); Stuk, Leuven (2020); Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Siegen (2020); Maison de la Culture, Namur/Belgium (2019) and KUNSTHAUS BASELLAND, Basel (2019), among others.
Upcoming solo exhibitions include FRAC Lorraine, Metz in 2021.
