Liv Schulman is a filmmaker, writer, and performance artist whose films and videos parody personal and political shortcomings in order to examine the larger structures that enable them. Often taking the form of multi-part series grounded in the absurd, her social satires enlist a variety of characters with self-referential narratives.
Read MoreBorn in Paris in 1985, Liv Schulman was raised in Buenos Aires. She studied fine arts and art writing at the Ecole nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris Cergy (2008, 2010) and the Goldsmith University of London (2011) respectively, after which she undertook postgraduate studies at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Lyon (2015).
In the three-season television series 'Control' (2016–17), a detective played by different actors wanders from episode to episode attempting to locate meaning in a storyline stripped of significance. Delivering long-winded monologues borrowing from art vocabulary, liberal economics, critical theory, and psychotherapy, characters become reflections of a paranoia in a society marked by alienation, identity devaluation, and quest for meaning.
Made in 2019, Schulman's six-episode series Le Goubernement fictionalises the lives and works of female, lesbian, queer, trans, and non-binary artists who lived in Paris from 1910–1980. Satirising the popular tendency to condense the lives of forgotten artists under a single format, Schulman's work bypasses biographical storytelling to raise the underlying structures that prompt the urge to generalise the many into one.
Released in the same year, the 28-minute video a somatic play shows six customs agents played by the same actress who attempt to regulate the flow of emotions in a fictionalised Mexico City devoid of borders, where social and economic foundations have begun to fissure.
In the four-part mock-horror series Brown, yellow, white and dead (2020), Schulman interrogates the idea of the 'prosumer' culture, in which consumers not only buy goods, but also produce and market them. The story is told through two film producers, an artist, and an unemployed actor as they produce a horror film. Staged against a cardboard setup decor with home-made costumes, Schulman's film questions the complicity of 'consumers' who partake in economies of production and the conditions under which the resulting works become perceived as art.
In the site-specific video installation Eurropa (2021), Schulman imagines a fictional Europe after the demise of the European Union and the border-free Schengen Agreement. Shown at CRAC Alsace (a French contemporary art centre situated near the borders of France, Germany, and Switzerland), the film depicts a group of border agents in an Europe devoid of union. Scattered around the exhibition space, each gallery was set up to represent one of seven countries, and viewers followed the protagonists who migrated from one screen to another. Accompanying the videos was a paper-mâché floor work made from tiles of pulped L'Alsace newspapers, which paved the way into a dialogue about capitalism and the history of taxation.
In 2018, Liv Schulman was the recipient of the 20th Fondation d'entreprise Ricard Prize.
Liv Schulman's works have shown widely in Europe and Argentina. Select solo exhibitions include: PIEDRAS Galeria, Buenos Aires (2021); CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2021); Galerie Art Concept, Paris (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019); Laboratorio, Buenos Aires (2019); Alt_Cph, Copenhagen (2018); and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2014).
Select group exhibitions include: Fundación Andreani, Buenos Aires (2021); Paranoia TV,, Austria (2020); 20th Fondation d'entreprise Ricard Prize, Paris (2018); Centro Cultural Kirchner, Buenos Aires (2018); Bregenz Biennale, Austria (2018); and Biennale de Rennes, France (2016).
Liv Schulman lives and works in Paris. She is represented by Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris.
The artist's website can be found here, and her Instagram here.
Elaine YJ Zheng | Ocula | 2022
