Lena Maria Thüring, Future Me, 2016. Video still
Future Me
2016. HD Video, single channel, 16:9, color, sound, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Albanian, Macedonian, English titles, 11′ 49″
Lena Maria Thüring’s art often grows out of conversations with others she translates into texts and videos. Thüring’s guiding question is how individual stories can help us think about social systems and the constructions that underlie them. As part of its Education Projects series, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst invited the artist to collaborate with high school students on a new work. She led the students in a workshop in which they wrote their memoirs, from birth to death, producing a series of semi-fictions: partly invented and partly autobiographical texts probing the boundary between the documentary and fictional registers — between recollection and dramatic imagination. Edited for greater density and added effect, the texts served as the basis for a script used in a subsequent video shoot. The result is a film that bears the hallmarks of a music video. The choreographies and dramatic scenes staged for the camera burst onto the screen with a mix of dancelike grace and combativeness, while the soundtrack features the students’ own offscreen voices reading their memoirs — a polyphonic verbal fabric in the rhythm of the images.
Søren Grammel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, Switzerland
SAYHERNAME
2017. Song, 6′ 05″
- Are there two or more women in it, who have names?
- Do they talk to each other?
- Do they talk to each other about something besides men?
What’s her voice sound like?
Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi, Hi
- Say: "Kiss me"
- I can't... rely on... my memories...
- Say: "Kiss me"
- Kiss me.
- I want you
- I want you
- Again
- I want you
- Put your hands on me
A doll of a woman pretending to be a doll pretending to be a woman
Look at her, look at her
What a face, she’s looking like a star
What a sight, so silent
Like a dream come true
She smiles, listens, waits
Accepting you to come and go
Look at her, look at her
What a face, she’s looking like a star, star, star
Men dream of women
Women dream of themselves being dreamt of
Men look at women
Women watch themselves being looked at
Moving slowly and gracious
Trapped in the gaze of her creator
She seems tamed, available,
Smiling into the camera
Lingering over her body
Giving you the pleasure of scopophilia
A female object of desire
Being there only for the spectator
Watching herself being looked at, just like a doll
A frozen image in the mirror, a ghost on a screen
A ghost on a screen
But what does she think? What would she say?
If she actually had a voice – Listen to me –
Does she even have a name?
Say her name
Look at her, look at her
What a face, she’s looking like a star
What a sight, so silent
Like a dream come true
She smiles, listens, waits
Accepting you to come and go
Look at her, look at her
What a face, she’s looking like a star, star, star
If a woman in a photograph can open her eyes, then what else is possible?
I can talk, I can walk
Already for a long time
I can move, I can groove
Will you listen to me now?
I’m here, right now
I’m standing my ground
I woke up like this
Will you listen to me now?
I’m the center of attention
Not orbiting like a satellite
Not existing in relation to you
My story has its own arc and spike
I shout it out loud - Are you listening to me now?
I’m a person not a sight, never give up that fight
Never give up that fight
Not afraid of repeating myself - Don’t act surprised
Listen to me, we’re too many, we have a voice
We have a voice
Look at her, look at her
What a face, she’s looking like a star
What a sight, so silent
Like a dream come true
She smiles, listens, waits
Accepting you to come and go
Look at her, look at her
What a face, she’s looking like a star, star, star
We’re not lost in time
Like tears in rain
It’s time, our time.
Say her name
Say my name
Name
Lyrics & Vocals: Lena Maria Thüring
Music: Fred Herrmann
Quotes:
Alison Bechdel, “Blade runner” (1982), “La Jetée” – Chris Marker, “Ways of seeing” John Berger, “Flawless” Beyoncé, Jenny Holzer
Bio
Lena Maria Thüring’s work explores individual stories in a reflection on social systems and their underlying constructions using various media, such as photography, performance, video or installation.
The interview forms both the starting point and the staging ground for much of Lena Maria Thüring’s recent filmic work. Her films and videos explore how individuals forge their identities and shield their memories in the shadow of larger group dynamics and the socio-political systems in which they are cast, using personal narrative — its gaps and elisions, its specificity and opacity — to reveal how meaning is constructed, projected, protected, and perhaps deconstructed. Detaching the spoken narrative from the subjects’ bodies and even their voices, Thüring creates a fissure between seeing and hearing, identity and biography. Within this space we can consider the nature of memory, the power of words, and the significance of all that remains unsaid.
Born in Basel 1981, lives and works in Zurich.
Thüring’s work had been shown in solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Baselland (2012) and the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel 2013 and in groupshows and screenings at the Kunstmuseum Bern, Kunsthalle Basel, Haus der Kulturen Berlin, the Reina Sofia National Museum Madrid in Spain and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. She received several awards including Swiss Art Award (2008), Kiefer Hablitzel Foundation Award (2011), Grant from Zurich City (2012), Manorkunstpreis Basel (2013) and two artist residencies in Paris (2009) and New York (2010).
Thüring is a member of the Fachausschuss Audiovision und Multimedia BS / BL.