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until 23.01. | #0253ARTatBerlin | We are pleased to announce our eighth solo exhibition with Sharon Lockhart (b. 1964), which will open on November 14 and remain on view until January 23.
For over 20 years, Lockhart has immersed herself in the daily lives of her subjects to make films and photographs that capture human vulnerability and authenticity through studied, choreographed compositions. During the production of her celebrated 2009 film Podwórka in Poland, Lockhart was struck by nine-year-old Milena’s strong presence and involvement as a sort of impromptu director. This exhibition emerges from the collaboration and friendship that has grown between them.
At the center of the exhibition is the photographic triptych Milena, Jarosław, 2013 (2014), which shows Milena, now a young woman, seated at a domestic table in three apparently successive moments. In this portrait, Milena partially obscures her face and controls her own visibility. In a parallel gesture, the photographs are placed on specially conceived architectural volumes that choreograph the visitor’s movement through the gallery’s main exhibition space. As an installation, the work paces a gradual reveal of Milena as well as the interaction between her, the camera and the viewer, exposing the multifarious act of looking that is embedded within the practice of photography.
Lockhart’s concern with what and how the viewer perceives is at the crux of her Untitled Study (Rephotographed Snapshot) series. Initiated in 1994, the Untitled Study works stem from an intimate process of appropriation, by which Lockhart rephotographs decades-old images, many of which have been selected from her own family albums. Calling to mind a range of sources from the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich to American occasion cards to European New-Wave cinema, the studies are private extracts from Lockhart’s own life as well as an investigation of the sociological, cultural and aesthetic operations of the photographic medium.
The pictured places and events are conceptually integral to the studies, which serve as an inspiration for the highly constructed images that appear in the artist’s large-format work. Continuing the complex cycle of viewing in the exhibition is the singular photograph Milena, Dębki, 2014 (2014), which presents Milena in action during her first encounter with the seaside. As a part of their collaboration, Lockhart set out to provide Milena with commonplace childhood experiences that she had not yet lived out. Here, Milena enters a world invisible to the viewer, looking beneath the surface of the sand she has just unearthed.
Lockhart’s recent work in Poland has developed parallel to the international exhibition trilogy Milena, Milena, curated by Adam Budak, which toured to the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2013), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2014), and Kunstmuseum Luzern (2015) and culminated in the publication of a comprehensive, full-color publication with text contributions by George Baker, Fanni Fetzer, Camilla Larsson, Lars Bang Larsen, and Frances Stark.
Lockhart’s related film Rudzienko – co-produced by the Liverpool Biennial and Kadist Art Foundation – is currently in its final stages of its production and will debut in a one-person exhibition at the Arts Club Chicago in 2016. Filmed over the course of more than two years, the work focuses on Milena and her classmates from a state-operated home just outside of Warsaw. Lockhart’s ongoing work with these young women has been influenced largely by the radical philosophies of Polish-Jewish pedagogue, children’s author and pediatrician Janus Korczak, who sought to empower the often-disregarded voice of the child.
Lockhart has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions throughout her career including those at LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, US (2012); the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, IL (2011); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, US (2011); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, DE (2008), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, US (2006); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, US (2001). She has been included in the biennials of Liverpool (2014), Shanghai (2014), Sydney (2006), and at the Whitney (2004, 2000, 1997), as well as in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim, New York (2015) and Bilbao (2003), MoMA PS1 (2013), and Kunsthaus Graz (2009).
Vernissage: Friday, 13th November 2015, 06:00 p.m. – 09:00 p.m.
Exhibition period: Saturday, 14th November 2015 to Saturday, 23rd January 2016
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Image caption: via neugerriemschneider
Sharon Lockhard – neugerriemschneider – Kunst in Berlin ART@Berlin
