“Lynn Hershman Leeson: Are Our Eyes Targets?” is the primary solo exhibition by the famend artist and media pioneer in Düsseldorf. Spanning your complete second ground of the inspiration, the exhibition options movies, photo-collages, and interactive and mixed-media installations that delve into the artist’s groundbreaking follow.

2024 marks the fortieth anniversary of the epic video set up, The Digital Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–2019 (1984–2019), which kinds the centerpiece of the exhibition. Hershman Leeson examines her private experiences of abuse and sickness and the connection between expertise and self, amid the worldwide political context. Because the work shifts between time frames and views, viewers encounter the evolution of a number of, generally contradictory personas that characterize the artist. These slipping identities lead us to query how a lot of what we see on our screens is true, revealing a niche between actuality and our mediated photos of it. Set towards the up to date media panorama, Hershman Leeson’s work rings more true than ever.

Along with the six-channel video set up, the exhibition includes the historic mixed-media set up Paranoid (1968–2022), from the Respiratory Machines sequence; a number of seven Phantom Limb photo-collages (1985–90); the interactive set up CybeRoberta (1996); the print Are Our Eyes Targets? (1984); and two movies, Seduction of a Cyborg (1994) and Shadow Stalker (2018–21). The primary video addresses the invasion of expertise into the physique whereas the latter takes a better have a look at the creation of digital identities and surveillance by the state. Collectively, these works examine the reciprocal results of seeing and being seen—whether or not in particular person, by way of the digicam lens, or in digital areas.

By way of her novel use of expertise and psychological evaluation, and her play with identities, Hershman Leeson brings a couple of energy shift that attracts consideration to and subverts our voyeuristic wishes. Throughout crucial, speculative, and documentary registers, she emboldens us to take again management of our our bodies, our photos, and our narratives, particularly as ladies.

at Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin
till February 2, 2025