30 March - 27 April 2011
iArt Gallery, 71 Loop Street
“We shall not cease from exploration /And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started /And know the place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot
“Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world…” Martin Heidegger
The Swimmers is an on-going series, presented here as an archive of 25 large, limited edition photographs, depicting almost-life-size figures, standing alone in various urban and natural landscapes. Liesching uses her swimmers to explore the link between space and identity and how we think of home. The work has grown out of a state of being that is a defining trait of Liesching’s generation: a sense of displacement, an awareness of foreignness and a search for belonging that cannot be tied to one fixed geographical or ideological place.
While these photographs may be considered “portraits”, there has been no attempt on Liesching’s part to accomplish the traditional aim of the photographic portrait - that being to capture and portray some sense of the sitter’s personality. Liesching views “identity” as a fiction: a series of instances, narrating something that we believe to be an integrated self. The people in the images act as signs, merely pointing to “the human”; a possible imaginary portrait of the collective psyche, as impacted by progress.
‘Long before embarking on this series, I experienced an uncontrollable desire to stand at the shoreline; to look outwards on the dissolving of limits that separate me from those I love. This literal struggle – with the seeming impossibility of departures, arrivals or reunions - turned into the driving force for these images. If the ocean is both the barrier and the passage; the swimmers are those caught in that liminal space, where borders are constantly erased and redrawn’ (Liesching).
CARLA LIESCHING (b.1985) is a photographer and visual artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a BFA from Rhodes University, specialising in photography and video, with undergraduate credits in theatre. Her involvement in performance arts has greatly influenced her approach to photography and her work is often narrative-based, revealing an acute understanding of dramaturgical composition.
Since graduating she has been involved in various exhibitions, performances and installations and her photographic work has been shown both locally and internationally. In 2010, some of The Swimmers were shown at South Africa’s largest biennale of contemporary art, Spier Contemporary, as well as the noteworthy UK show, I am solitary I am an army. Beers.Lambert, the international curatorial initiative that coordinated the exhibition, described the show as a “celebration of some of the very best emergent art from around the world.” Part of the series is also included in the upcoming exhibition, Lens: fractions of contemporary photography and video in South Africa, which focuses on “Utopian/Dystopian qualities of the lens.”
Liesching is also involved in arts education, having run workshops for the South African National Children’s Arts Festival, assistant lecturing under Brent Meistre at Rhodes University and, most recently, teaching analogue photography at the Market Photography Workshop in Johannesburg.
She has spent time living and working in Taipei, and will be relocating to New York in May 2011.