Liv Schulman: The Gobernment

A radically reconfigured gallery with no single entry point or sequence of works, no hierarchy, no center or periphery, welcomes visitors. Architectural interventions, sculptural objects, and theatrical props jostle with six moving-image channels, opening up a space that mobilizes all of our faculties. This augmented experience offers a glimpse into a different, more egalitarian world, where power is offset by self-determination, diverse knowledge, sensuality, imagination, and becoming.

In the videos, seven actresses—Eden Tinto-Collins, Agathe Paysan, Catherine Hargreaves, Chloe Giraud, Manuela Guevara, Viviana Méndez Moya (Curtis Putralk), and Nicole Mersey—play over forty-five female-identifying artists. Roles are fluid. Different actresses take turns playing an artist/character, accentuating different dimensions of her life and work. An actress may also play several roles simultaneously, layering life-stories and aesthetic pursuits. Identities circulate, evolve, and sometimes dissolve, echoing the circulation of social, political, and psychological constructs at the heart of the artist’s practice. Real stories, anecdotes, and fictions interweave and shuffle temporalities into a provocatively uncertain present of collective becoming.

Neither a realistic film, a period fiction nor a rational history, The Gobernment is a fictional historical revision that turns words, speech, and images into fluid characters emancipated from phallocratic discourse.

This exhibition and a survey of Liv Schulman’s video work accompany The New Inflation, a new performance in three episodes, granting Bemis’s visitors unprecedented access to the artist’s accomplishments and creative process. This tripartite project is the first North American presentation of work by Paris-based Argentinian artist Liv Schulman, winner of the 20th edition of the prestigious Fondation d’entreprise Ricard Prize (2018).

Liv Schulman focuses on the ability of language to affect a body. Through her filmed fictions, theatrical performances, lectures, and novelistic writing, she creates characters and collectives who utter logorrheic speeches, interchangeable ghosts ventriloquized by disarticulated monologues, borrowing from the vocabulary of art, liberal economics, Marxist critical theory, or psychotherapy, trying to recreate affects in the economy under which we live. The main resources for her work are the different translations and adaptations of language through the instrumental use of a body. Free from its receiver, detached from its speaker, delivered in inhospitable situations, Schulman tries to see if language allows for a reorganization of a system. livschulman.com