Names, 1985–89.
Since the beginning of her career, in the mid-’80s, Jac Leirner’s works have stood as monuments of loss and memorials to consumption and waste, in the form of accumulations of ordinary things: Brazilian hundred-cruzeiro notes rendered nearly worthless by hyperinflation, empty cigarette packets charting the slow process of giving up smoking. If at times Leirner veers dangerously close to the driest form of institutionalized conceptualism, her installations always manage to surprise us with their sense of discretion, intimacy, even empathy. They remember traces of experiences and people that slip from memory: shucked envelopes, items we use on planes and leave behind when we land, business cards we’re handed and never look at again.
