„I became absorbed by a hot and all consuming love affair with linomonster last March and I am not entirely sure we are ready for being seen in public together… I began excavating, hacking, drawing, stroking, and re-etching the public in medical lecture halls, observing, being trained in how to look at, how to see into the wound, into the body…I want to look at those who learn to do this type of looking. I want to learn how they discipline themselves to fit into the hierarchy, how this affects their work, and how this then stretches out to society.“
Patricia Andersdottir Roth, otherwise known as Precarious Artistic Researcher, or PAR, May 2019.
Using traditional drawing techniques while obviously alluding to independent comix and zine (sub)culture as well as nodding towards Manga, Lisa Glauer is using linoleum printmaking to ironically comment both the machismo of eighties style German painters working under the label „neoexpressionism“ and art historical references. It builds the story about a Precarious Artistic Researcher and her repeated bouncing off the Man Suit Barriers she encounters during her dealings with institutionalized patriarchy, before venturing into darker territory of the history of the Women‘s Clinic in Berlin, located close to the former Cold War Iron Curtain, where Precarious Artistic Researcher has been working. In her large scale wall prints, she deals with the public attending presentations in medical lecture halls found im historical archives.
„Attempts to give a different foundation to knowledge and agency clash with monumental machineries of discipline and control. As societies tighten their normative frameworks amidst global backlash, their power is ever more poignantly felt. Lisa Glauer has persistently addressed in her work the conflicted power politics shaping the history of Berlin‘s Charité hospital complex being one prime example.
(…) It evokes and uncanny sensation: As much as we struggle to grasp the political forces that shaped history, these forces that shaped history, these forces, back in the day, will have already created a consciousness of their own. The past will have known itself, in unwritten and unspoken ways we might never be able to recollect. In this sense, what speaks from the collective gaze of the carved out faces might be an enormous knowledge of consent and compliance as well as dissent and recalcitrance. The cuts summon the presence of this memory base.“
Jan Verwoert, Curatorial text for „What if it won‘t stop here?“ Archive Books, Berlin, 2018.
Lisa Glauer grew up in London, Marseille, Rabat, Prague, Genoa and Athens. When she was eight years old, she was pushed into the public space of an international soccer game between Rabat American School and Casablanca International School, without having a clue about this very important game. So, after a moment of hesitation, she decided to use the skills she had: drawing on her extensive ballet training, she began dancing and leaping elegantly on the playing field. She is convinced this experience is directly related to her long term practice based artistic research into using human breastmilk as drawing and painting material.
Lisa Glauer is socially engaged painter working at the interface to installation and public art, and has worked as curator and art & design theorist, working on materiality, borderlands, art and commemoration. She is based in Berlin.