Eva Lis explores issues of migration, exploitation, morality and elasticity of morality focusing on the idea of poverty and tragedy as a form of entertainment. The topic of migration often reoccurs in her work, turning the question “free from what” into “free for what”. She is also interested in the ethics of aesthetics the means of artistic production, its use and relation to power and politics.
Drawing on her “fierce, rural upbringing” she explores intermediality using glass, mirror, aluminum, etched knife blades, sculpted soap bars and cut outs of demons and hybrids. Juxtaposition and distortions of material culture overtly reconstruct the viewer’s memory but set in fantastical landscapes such as a horse pulling a box of paper demons around a concrete magic circle that represents the M25.
The project “Parade of the Denizens” (2007, a collaboration with Canadian artist Edward Pien) explored issues of migration and displacement. "I was interested in how an individual becomes the product of cultural crossbreeding through the ‘journeys‘ into multiculturalism and what kind of objects and artworks are produced by such influences (…).“Parade of the Denizens” was a product of a cultural fusion. It was a journey through memory, landscape, culture and the mind"
The idea of Tunel Vision (2010), Eva’s latest project was a labyrinthian architectural object that directed the viewer through space, based on the lines of her fingerprint, thus making a direct link between identity and the environment and demonstrating how they construct each other in an often disconcerting way. To build the tunnels Lis employed four migrant workers. During its installation the workers became inebriated after their first payment and never returned to work. The abandoned project then transformed into a monument of disharmony between ideologies and socio-economic realities in all its glorious dismantlement.
The structure was in constant construction. The workers dressed up in a high visibility vests were on site throughout repairing damages and changing the paths of the structure and they become part of the project as unwitting performers. They were unaware of being a subject of this socio-cultural critique.
She describes her work as: personal, political and poetic; personal because it is sparked by my own experience; political because my personal experience was often formed by the political circumstances; and poetic because I discuss those relationship between personal experience and political situation in aesthetic, metaphorical format.
Born 1971, Lublin, Poland. Lives in London, UK
Eva Lis is represented by WW Gallery.
Education:
MA/MFA, UCL Slade School of Art, London, UK
BA Fine Art, Westminister University, London, UK
Selected projects:
2010, Young Polish Art_Metal, Metal, Chalkwell Hall, Southend on Sea, UK
2010, MA/MFA UCL Slade Degree Show, London, UK
2010, Pursuit of Hapiness, Arsenal Gallery, Poznan, Poland
2009, Is Anybody There?, WW Gallery, London, UK
2009, Summer Exhibitionists, WW Gallery, London, UK
2009, Travelling Light, WW Gallery/Pharos, London and Venice Biennale (collateral event)
