Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf
11 April 2024 - 06 April 2025
The group exhibition “Digital Diaries” looks at how artists have experimented with diaristic forms in video and digital art from the 1970s to today. Inspired by the iconic work The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson 1984–2019 (1984–2019), which is simultaneously on view, “Digital Diaries” gathers videos, photographs, video sculptures and mixed-media works that record artists’ intimate experiences. Placing works from the collection in dialogue with loaned pieces, the exhibition combines early videos by Sophie Calle and Hannah Wilke with contemporary works by Alex Ayed, Sophie Gogl, Hannah Perry, and Tromarama, among others.
Intertwining images and personal writing, these artists use storytelling and digital technologies to craft images of themselves and reveal their private lives. From self-portraiture and home videos to phone messages and chatroom conversations, the works move from the intimacy of daily life, as in a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans and a video by Ken Okiishi, to a wider sociopolitical view, like in Rindon Johnson’s video. Drawing on the evolution of film, video, and photography, as well as on our communication tools, the artists reflect on the impact technologies have had on the construction and performance of gender and identity.
Feminism informs many of the early diaristic practices on view. In the late 1970s to the 1990s, Sophie Calle and Hannah Wilke directed the camera toward their own bodies and simultaneously recorded private conversations with friends and lovers. Yet their video diaries extend beyond the self, playfully reversing a normative gaze that objectified women in film. At the end of the 1990s and throughout the 2000s, works by Kristin Lucas, Sarah Lucas, and Frances Stark accentuate this performative aspect and question gender roles, particularly within romantic relationships. More recent videos further deconstruct identities and move beyond the gender binary.
With the advent of social media, over the past fifteen years, artists have pushed the limits of storytelling through mediated images. With a hint of irony, Jota Mombaça and Martine Syms capture the confessional tone of online posting, to ask: Amid the constant and overwhelming stream of images, how much self-representation and public disclosure is too much? While carving a space for their intimate and situated experiences, the artists in “Digital Diaries” critically reflect on performativity, and disrupt the slickness of the image we present as our self to the world.
Curator: Line Ajan