In Person:
Lis Rhodes
May 27 and 28, 2009
Lis Rhodes is one of the principal artists of British avant-garde film after 1970. In contrast to her contemporaries Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal or Chris Welsby, her films have hardly been shown in Austria. After working with the London Filmmakers' Co-op she co-founded Circles (later: Cinenova), the first distribution company for films and videos by women. This engagement for female representation in the art world is also reflected in her essays and some of her films.
Rhodes started out with abstract or "absolute" films like Dresden Dynamo (1971), emphasizing the synaesthetic interplay of colour, movement and sound. A highlight of her presentations at the Film Museum will be the performance of her legendary Expanded Cinema double projection Light Music: a dynamic light and sound environment amplified by a smoke machine. Since the late 1970s, her films have moved towards an investigation of complex historical, social and political processes. They deal with expulsion (in the past and the present), the sealing-off of Europe towards immigrants, the invasion of Iraq, violence against women, and the classification of female identity.
In these later works Lis Rhodes achieves a unique blend of photography, Super-8- and 16mm-film, drawing, writing, and a literary language which is fully aware of the impossibility of defining "reality" in an unambiguous way. Her layering of these levels creates three-dimensional pictorial spaces which correspond to her mysterious, poetical-political texts. „Only the permitted is really visible in a culture that equates ,real’ with ,visible’. Like most systems it has a rational explanation for its existence. It’s property. Who owns it?“ (Running Light, 1996)
A joint programme of sixpackfilm and the Austrian Film Museum.
