In her work, Lisa Kohl is interested in the relationship between artistic creation and social reality. She goes in the field near border or peripheral regions, that are unstable even dangerous, to meet people who live in precarious and difficult conditions. She establishes relationships of exchange and trust with them that allow her to work with their consent.
Using her favorite media, photography, video and sound, she develops a personal visual language that reflects their empathy, sensitivity and commitment. The question of image processing as a means of representation and of the author’s responsibility for the subject represented, the artist worries. She wants to give a voice to those condemned to silence. By placing them as actors in her images, she gives them back their human dignity and at the same time, in a real context, she opens a space for reflection on the theme addressed.
Lisa Kohl’s works speak of flight, exile, homelessness or survival, facelessness and absence. Lisa Kohl apprehends the unimaginable and tends to represent the unrepresentable. With daring, she succeeds in linking reality to poetry. Her purpose involves protesting against a hostile and cold condition and, simultaneously, it allows us, through the poetic aesthetics of images, to conceive of a world where hope is possible.
ERRE, the installation she presents at the Chapelle de la Charité as part of Lët’z Arles and the Rencontres d’Arles, consists of a video and sound installation called HAVEN and light boxes that carry the photographic series PASSAGE // 32 ° 32’04.7 “N 117 ° 07’26.3“ W and SHELTER. The juxtaposition of the works opens a space of experience and association of ideas that brings us back to our collective memory and invites us to reflect on identity, homeland, border crossing, futility and hope.
Lët’z Arles : Lisa Kohl : ERRE
4 juillet – 26 septembre 2021
Chapelle de la Charité
Arles
