Kris Lemsalu

Project
Wisdom and Eggs

Location
Loftsson

Date
11. – 19. April 2015

Kris Lemsalus sculptures, performances are parts that stand for a big whole. Like objects in a collection, like exhibition pieces in a museum or the venerated fetishes of a religion, that do not distinguish between good and bad, between the earthly and the beyond, they are temporarily left behind by the artist. The materials and media that she uses, porcelain, leather, wool, her body, are almost archaic in their originality. But the forms they assume are determined by virtuality, by masquerade, by analogy, by what seems and not what is.

The originality of Kris Lemsalu is invented and staged. With the use of her body, too, the artist is not exposing truthfulness and authenticity. She refers to the great importance of humour and irony. She concretises the false truths of media surfaces in real material and gets us to laugh about many things that are sold to us as beautiful, genuine, as necessary and desirable. The joke the artist applies and at the same time produces, permits a liberating distance, allows us to assume the distance that we so urgently need if it is supposed to be about keeping ourselves and our media self-portrayals separate from one another.

Kris Lemsalu represented Estonia at the 58th Venice biennial with exhibition “Birth V – Hi and Bye”. The exhibition took place on Giudecca 211, 30133 from May 11 to November 24, 2019. Birth is always an action. Deep in the primordial ooze, an accidental creature coalesced.

Kris Lemsalu lives and works in Vienna.