Routes of Empathy
Alumna Lizza May David presents her artistic work in conversation with Prof. Stella Geppert (Burg Giebichenstein) as part of the digital lecture series Routes of Empathy.
In various exhibition projects and collaborations, the artist would like to show examples of how the questioning of authorship evokes spaces of empathy and a change of perspective. Whether in documentary film or painting, it is about moments that elude authorship by harnessing non-knowledge as an artistic process. In the exhibition Bahala Ka [What do I know?] (2020), for example, the artist was concerned with including air as an entity in the working process. Translated from Filipino into English, "Bahala Ka" means "I leave it up to you" or "It is your responsibility". In doing so, she transfers communicative negotiation processes to artistic issues, in this case painting. In the collaboration with Gabriel Rossell Santillàn, on the other hand, they followed the traces of a Bauhinia plant to intuitively investigate questions of colonial domination and its trade routes, imagining the Pacific Ocean as the starting point of the research. Artist Unknown (2014) is about paintings in Philippine institutions - what is visible and what is not?
In her works, Lizza May David is interested in affects and moments that elude representability and for this very reason always lead to new experimental approaches. In doing so, she does not start from existing binary simplifications of the world, but rather from relational thinking in crossings, turning points, intersections and ramifications. She often expands her artistic forms of expression of painting and drawing with cinematic elements and in this way creates space-consuming installations. It is questions of identity, work, migration and various forms of remembering and (non-)knowing that the artist gives articulation to.
All talks in the lecture series will be recorded and made available afterwards on the Burg's website for anyone who is interested.
When? Where?
16 June 2021, 6pm
Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle (online)