Lilly Renaud-Dewar
I am intact and I don't care, 2015
textile and wood
189 x 85 cm
About the work
Combining personal history with official history is a theme that the artist shares with Danh Vo, Latifa Echakhch, Agnieszka Kurant and Goshka Macuga, in an attempt to give the past more dynamism. Reynaud-Dewar's performances hark back to the theatre of Bertolt Brecht and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Since 2013, the artist has focused on the historical dances performed by Josephine Baker in Paris in 1925: the Charleston from the Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Art Deco at its best. Baker, the muse of Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Christian Dior, a leading opponent of racial discrimination in the United States, has also become Reynaud-Dewar's muse. She recreates Baker's dance style and evolves naked in historical settings such as the Belvedere Museum, Vienna, MAC Lyon, Le Consortium Dijon and Fondazione Querini-Stampalia in Venice.
By dancing naked in temporarily closed public spaces, the artist transforms public space into something private. The video recordings of these performances become part of her installations, which are displayed alongside printed fabrics, some partially bleached with eau de Javel, others with texts referring to the early discourse on AIDS. By dancing naked in institutional spaces when no visitors are present, she questions the status of these places, public but inaccessible, and ultimately makes them visible to the public only through film.
For "I'm intact and I don't care", also a tribute to Rimbaud who inspired the title of the work, she introduces a bedroom: a bed with an inkwell in the middle and walls decorated with panels covered with floral motifs, half of which have been washed out. The inkwell refers to writing, to text that she regularly prints on large canvases around her installations. These are texts from books by Marguerite Duras, Donna Haraway, Octavia Butler, William Burroughs and Guillaume Dustan. Each installation also functions as a sound work, with texts read aloud and displayed on LED screens hanging high above the opera stage, like an opera libretto.
Lily Reynaud-Dewar
b. 1975, La Rochelle, France.
Lives and works in Grenoble and Geneva.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar is a French installation and performance artist. She participated in the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008), the Paris Triennial in 2012, the 12th Lyon Biennale in 2013 and the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. In 2013, she received the Prix Ricard and was commissioned by the Frieze Foundation in London. Reynaud-Dewar studied classical ballet and art criticism at the Glasgow School of Arts. She began her career in 2005, focusing on the relationship between sculpture and text, but four years later film and performance became her primary media. She teaches at the Geneva College for Art and Design and founded the feminist art criticism magazine Pétunia.