Lili Reynaud-Dewar

For the duration of her solo exhibition in Vienna, “Live Through That?!,” Lili Reynaud-Dewar presents herself naked and dancing in a silent looped video (all works 2014) that shares the title of the show—as do the rest of the works on view—and holds its own in a multimedia setting of moving images, sound, and sculptural elements. This diary-like video—an “homage” to dances performed by Josephine Baker—references Reynaud-Dewar’s training as a ballet dancer and was shot earlier this year at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago as part of “The Fifth Dimension,” a group exhibition curated by Monika Szewczyk. Reynaud-Dewar’s current, sensitively constructed show, which departs from the ornamentality of the wallpapers for which she attracted international attention, deals primarily with questions of self-representation. Here, intimacy and the everyday solidify into works that afford the viewer insight into a practice that draws on the artist’s own life as material.

A new series of assemblages made with men’s suits consists of the clothing draped flat between two plates of glass, which she wraps almost brutally with duct tape. Their movements mimic frozen postures and bodily contortions and point to the repressed remains of an absent inner life. In another gallery, visitors encounter a five-speaker sound installation that features excerpts of conversations with French autofiction authors such as Marguerite Duras and Guillaume Dustan, who talk about mundane topics, as well as an electronic-music composition by Nicolas Murer (aka Macon). The speakers are embedded in small sculptures that resemble miniature beds, complete with frame, mattress, and sheets. (They bring to mind the artist’s previous sculptures of beds with ink fountains in the middle.) In the end, “Live Through That?!” leads the viewer to wonder: How do we live through things? Reynaud-Dewar offers a possible answer in the title of a work from 2012 with the rhetorical question: Why should our bodies end at the skin?

Translated from German by Diana Reese.