Dana Lixenberg, internationally acclaimed artist and the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, will exhibit her „Imperial Courts“ video at Organ Vida Festival!
Dana Lixenberg’s Imperial Courts project tracks the changing shape of a small, inner-city community from South Central Los Angeles through a combination of video, and an extensive series of black and white photographs. The photographs and videos result from Lixenberg’s extended and collaborative relationship with the residents of Imperial Courts, a place she became familiar with after travelling to Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King riots in April 1992. Beginning in 1993, and continuing until the spring of 2015, Lixenberg gradually created an extensive portrait of this community over twenty-two years, electing to face away from the spectacle of destruction, and to look toward those whose lives typically receive public notice only in the event of calamity.
In addition to her series of three hundred and ninety-three black and white photographs, and a monograph published by ROMA Publications in 2015, Lixenberg produced a series of videos in Imperial Courts, which are carefully edited in to a sixty-nine minute three channel video projection that runs on a loop. Lixenberg’s videos immerse us in the dense fabric of daily life in this small housing project through an interlinking chain of vignettes that skip across three channels. Her alternating images are set against the changeable volatile score of nearby houses, cars, ice-cream trucks and streets. In one vignette, Lixenberg invites us to observe a rite of passage as a young couple prepares to depart for their senior prom, their every move photographed by a panoply of cameras and camera-phones. In another, she sets a still camera close to a modest memorial that borders a jungle gym while small children play in a bounce house in the distance.
In yet another, three women debate the merits of wood-grilled fast food in an impromptu hair salon arranged outside their row houses, set in the shade of the glistening sun, their conversation drowned by the penetrating sound of LAPD helicopters flying overhead. Lixenberg’s videos capture life in Imperial Courts in a spectrum from drama and play to aimlessness and routine, enhancing our grasp of the normalcy of life in a part of the American inner-city habitually derided as aberrant and extreme.Imperial Courts thus frames the continuity of community against the changelessness of an inner-city landscape, rejecting sensationalism and spectacle in favour of sensitivity. In this way, Imperial Courts creates a multi-layered, evocative record of twenty-two years in an underserved community of African-American and Latin-American people living in the City of Angels.
Dana Lixenberg (1964, Amsterdam) studied Photography at the London College of Printing in London (1984-1986) and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (1987-1989). She gained international recognition through her work for publications such as Vibe, The New Yorker, Newsweek and Rolling Stone. Her projects often focus on individuals and communities on the margins of society. These include Jeffersonville, Indiana (2005) a collection of landscapes and portraits of the small town’s homeless population and The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008), which documents an Inupiaq community on an eroding island off the coast of Alaska. Her most recent body or work is Imperial Courts (2015), a complex and evocative record of the passage of time in an underserved community in Watts, Los Angeles. Her work has been widely exhibited and can be found in prominent collections, such as Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and FNAC, France. Her books include Imperial Courts, 1993-2015 (2015), Set Amsterdam (2011),The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008), Jeffersonville, Indiana (2005), and united states (2001). She lives in New York and Amsterdam.
Working hours of Museum of Contemporary Art:
Monday – Friday, 11 – 18; Saturday, 11 – 20; Sunday 11 – 18
