DÜSSELDORF, Germany — The first comprehensive survey in Germany of the American feminist artist and video pioneer Lynn Hershman Leeson, at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, is an exhilarating, if anxiety-inducing, experience. As an early adapter of video technology, the artist was one of the first to grapple with the fraught potential of digital tools. The survey, featuring video installations, photography, and mixed media, sees the artist wielding a camera in an intimate and confessional way, using it to probe notions of authenticity and truth, and critiquing digital images themselves as a rapidly proliferating means of surveillance. In this sense, the show’s title, Are Our Eyes Targets?, is particularly apt, and chilling: Eyes, the saying goes, are the windows to the soul — but in our age, baring one’s soul to the camera carries a hefty price tag. The more advanced digital tech becomes, Hershman Leeson seems to warn, the more vigilant we must all be against its lurid seductions.
Upon entering the space, visitors are immediately confronted by multiple portraits: The artist’s face populates all six video channels showing excerpts from Hershman Leeson’s seminal video-art series, The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–2019 (1984–2019). Transparent glass partitions divide the screens, so that the images seem to interpenetrate one another. The visual cornucopia is a striking embodiment of how the artist saw herself: as an enigma, splintered by trauma. In imagistic snippets, aided by expressionistic, dreamy clips from early cinema, she tells of domestic sexual and physical abuse she suffered as a child. Heartbreaking, dark, and brave, the work powerfully breaks the taboo of speaking of such trauma outside a psychoanalyst’s office. But it is the video’s intimacy that is most compelling: The whisper, the close-up, the averted gaze — all enhance a sense of a diaristic, confessional closeness, in a way that builds a kind of conspiracy between artist and viewer.
Other snippets depict Hershman Leeson’s self-described “private apocalypse”: divorce, wildly fluctuating weight, binging, sudden life-threatening illness. Yet a sense of healing is also felt in these voiceovers, such as when she narrates the experience of a sudden feeling of déjà vu upon her abusive father’s death, as well as descriptions of her daughter’s birth and her new marriage. Elsewhere, she expands the scope of Electronic Diaries to include interviews with scientists. Taking a cue from her own intimate relationship with video, she imagines a Cyborgian future in which humans merge with technology. At first, this merger sounds vaguely optimistic. But by the end of the project, she’s clearly ambivalent: In 2019, the last year of the series, she encoded the series’s video archive onto a strand of DNA to create a durable archive (the lifespan of the genetic material is longer than that of a hard-drive), yet bemoans the invasiveness of that very procedure.
The dark note shouldn’t come as a surprise. In the acerbic “Paranoid,” (1968–2022), which opens the Stoschek show, a wig with butterfly pins nested inside a glass harrasses visitors as they approach with words like: “You think you’re so clever,” “Please go away,” and “Look at someone else. Look at yourself.” And as early as 1994, the artist was delivering grim messages of digital dependency, aggression, and intrusiveness in works such as “Seduction of Cyborg,” also included at Stoschek, which follows a young woman who gets sucked into her computer screen. Another work, “CybeRoberta” (1996), comprised of a seemingly ordinary doll sitting inside a glass vitrine, allows viewers to access a designated website via a QR code displayed on the wall and then to change the position of “Roberta”’s digital eye to see real-time images of themselves in the gallery. Needless to say, finding myself so thoroughly surveilled by a seemingly benign toy was morbidly riveting, but also genuinely disconcerting.
A more recent video, “Shadow Stalker” (2018–21) confronts the controversial surveillance software Predpol, which uses data analytics to allegedly predict crime. In it, a Black woman revolutionary, played by Tessa Thompson, decries a culture of paranoia created from racialized data-assisted policing. In portraying the escalation of techno-social dystopias, Hershman Leeson reminds viewers that digital technologies and the images they help capture and disseminate were never neutral receptacles of private truths, but instead have always been political battlegrounds.
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Are Our Eyes Targets? continues at the Julia Stoschek Foundation (Schanzenstraße 54, Düsseldorf, Germany) through February 2, 2025. The exhibition was organized by Lisa Long and Line Ajan.
