Lynne Marsh, Taking Positions, 2017, HD video with sound, 7:23 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Tintype, London, UK
Taking Positions is a performance-for-screen that was recorded in the empty gallery space of Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin. Originally the State Studio of Arno Breker, an “official state sculptor” of the Third Reich, the building was recently transformed into a gallery for postwar German Modernism. In the lead-up to its opening in 2015, Lynne Marsh invited six female performers to embody the postures of Breker’s mannered statues of women made between 1938 and 1944.
Marsh worked with figure groupings and camera positions premised pictorially on exhibition documentation and photographs of the human figure in sculpture from this period. Narrative symbolism, scale, movement and the relation between modernity and classicism are played out through the aesthetics of gesture, architecture and frame on the screen-as-stage. Taking Positions continues Marsh’s exploration of how the body is directed in space and how the camera participates in the production of power and spectacle.
Performers: Carolina Hellsgård, Katie Lee Dunbar, Lisa S. Carneiro, Mia Sellmann, Cristina Nyffeler.
Choreographer: Emma Waltraud Howes Camera: Daniel Sippel, Camera Assistant: Michael Freudenthaler
Lynne Marsh is a Canadian based in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented by Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2017); Opera North, Leeds (2016); fig-2 at Institute for Contemporary Art, London (2015); Scrap Metal, in association with Toronto International Film Festival (2014); and Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2008). Her work has also been featured at La Biennale de Montréal (2014); The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2012); 53 Art Museum, Guangzhou, China (2011); Manif d'art - The Québec City Biennial (2010); and the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007). Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queens University; and Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Marsh is represented by Tintype, London.