Ligia Lewis with Amit Noy

Me Seeing You Seeing Me Seeing You Seeing Me ad infinitum, until the walls break down, the plastic bags around our shoes decompose, the benches we’re sitting on decay, and the sound system breaks. Ad infinitum until there’s nothing left but the seeing and the me, no matter how unstable or temporary this arrangement ever was. Ad infinitum until the surfaces of punctuated time—an ending, a beginning—become impossible to locate. Ad infinitum because a line in space is a fact, and facts are simply perceptions and surfaces.¹

Over there, a me (Ley) investigates the marriage of harm and a hard space; head thudding against the wall, they utter a reflexive “I’m fine” before consummating the marriage yet again. Here, another me (Miguel Angel Guzmán) legs akimbo, thighs kissing the wall, grunts in a certain uncertain way. Later—which is to say here but soon—the same Miguel me runs backwards whilst slapping his butt, but nothing is recognizable. Not the way the slap happens, and not the bodily comportment: this me disappears its own coherence. This me plays the problem within the problem of representation.

I’m describing scenes from study now steady, a suite of live choreographic studies that anchor Ligia Lewis’s first solo exhibition. study now steady is also the name of the entire exhibition, which runs through February 4th, 2024 at Center for the Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) in Chelsea. The project marks two uncommon ventures—the format of the solo museum show devoted entirely to the work of a choreographic artist, and a US presentation by Lewis (b. 1983, Santo Domingo), who lives and works in Berlin. Over the past decade, Lewis has honed a taut choreographic practice that playfully confounds questions of identity, race, and power through baroque theatrical maneuvers. In her performances, the oscillation between subject and subjugation is deliberately obtuse—she teaches us that to be one is to make yourself available to the other, and that contemporary life renders the refusal of either impossible.

The show at CARA is comprised of the eponymous live performance and two video works from the past several years: deader than dead (2020), originally commissioned by the Hammer Museum for the Made in L.A. Biennial, and A Plot A Scandal (2023), a new video work based on Lewis’s 2022 stage piece of the same name. On the occasion of Lewis’s first solo exhibition, I spoke with her about study now steady as it pertains to her wider body of work. Our conversation also references the live performance iteration of A Plot/A Scandal (2022), which I saw several months prior at Festival Actoral in Marseille, France.

Amit Noy (Rail): What’s emerged for you while working for the first time in the format of an exhibition?

Ligia Lewis: It’s a thing about time—about how time unfolds. I think what drives my practice is the act of organizing time, really. In the gallery space there’s the immediacy of the body, the intimacy of being next to a body in this kind of process—it’s powerful. Of course, you’re breaking the more traditional way of viewing dance: the one perspective of the theater that can be very flattening. In the gallery, you have another way of engaging with affect, and the fleshiness of a body.… There’s something operating on an experiential level in this setting that’s very rich. Yet there’s also the trouble of the fetishization of the body in the museum, in a space that privileges looking at objects. As a racialized body, a Black woman, that’s something I wrestle with, and that’s why the interrogation of the gaze, or me seeing you seeing me, is so important. I’m working through these processes of racialization and what it means to be a raced body.

The title of the work, study now steady, is to say that my work develops out of a critical engagement with the body through practice, as a practitioner. As someone who comes from dance, I work somatically to build a language from the body that spills outward. So study now steady is those studies, those movement studies that later turn into concepts and larger works. That space of play in the studio is my place of study.

Rail: One thing that’s present in the show at CARA that you can’t experience in the black box is the potential for being the only viewer. The first day I came, I arrived half an hour before closing time on a weekday, and I was the only audience member watching the live studies. I became hyperconscious of my own self, and the way my presence impacted the experience of these performers.

One of the things I really enjoy about the work of yours I’ve seen is its layered-ness; its plurality of medium. When I was watching A Plot/A Scandal live, the way the different mediums were interacting felt like a chorus of information.

Lewis: Like the spilling of the sound of Code Noir from the video of A Plot A Scandal into all these little live macabre sketches in study now steady? [Laughter]

Rail: Yeah. I got the impression that you have a very specific relationship to interdisciplinary collaboration, and so I wanted to ask you about that. How do you work with sound, or with light—how are you making those decisions?

Lewis: I just don’t separate the disciplines, and I let myself dream a lot. I’m not precious about it. I tell people, I’m never busy with trying to be good at anything. I’m just more interested in expressive potential.

I start. I prepare materials. I’m drawn to an image or a piece of music and I don’t know why. I try to unpack it. Through the process of creation, a whole world emerges, and then it becomes about sculpting it, tending to it every day. I’m trying to listen to what the material wants to become… I’m not busy with trying to make sense.

I work a lot with, not dreams per say, but I allow myself to be in a dream-like space of fantasy. They’re all very imagistic, the pieces I’ve worked on. They’re saturated with the act of construction, of image-making, and also the terror of being an image. This thing of, “Oh god, now I’m two-dimensional.” It’s the process of reduction that falls upon racialized bodies: you lose your interiority; you become just a surface. I work a lot with the idea of surface as well, and the terror of being just a surface, of not being given the opportunity of having interiority. What emerges is a plasticity, and I love this kind of artifice. I struggle with authenticity, actually, as a thing to stage. I work with the problem of representation through representation. Which sounds weird, but it’s how I’ve come to understand it. You acknowledge the frame and then you go, “Okay, this is a fiction.” It could be the truth, or I could be totally lying to you.

Rail: deader than dead, created in 2020 for the Made in L.A. biennial, is the oldest piece in the exhibition. What does that work mean for you right now?

Lewis: What I’ve realized as of late, and what I like about the exhibition space, is that you’re not trapped inside the logic of “the latest thing,” but that your work can be in conversation with earlier work, because they’re all conceptually still important. They all talk about the problem of representation itself; that we’re trapped in a logic of seeing through representation. How that system touches racialized bodies is just… so fucked.

I like the idea of the work killing itself off. That nothing is left. Because I’m busy with this idea of an extractive economy that thirsts on Black expression to provide hope of progress, of futurity, when structurally nothing within the reality we live in supports that. Representation explicitly works against the Black or Blackened subject. You never have full agency of your representation, so I’ve been working in cryptic ways. Trying to deal with the terror of that, and not knowing how, yet not moving into a more hopeful space…

These impossibilities are what shape my artistic concerns.