Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy, Isabel Lewis’ work takes on many different formats: from lecture-performances and workshops to music sessions, parties, installations, and what she calls “hosted occasions.” She has created works around topics such as open source technology and dance improvisation, social dances as cultural storage systems, collaborative creative formats, future bodily techniques, and rapping as embodied speech acts. Her work has been commissioned and presented by the Sharjah Biennial (2019); Creative Time and Art Basel (2018), Gropius Bau Berlin (2018), Tate Modern London (2017); Ming Contemporary Art Museum Shanghai (2016 – 2017); Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2015); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2014); Liverpool Biennial (2014); Frieze London (2014); Tanz Im August Berlin (2015); Kunsthalle Basel (2014); Serpentine Galleries (2012); Dia Foundation, New York (2016); and Palais de Tokyo Paris (2016). Lewis is Berlin-based, born in the Dominican Republic and raised on a man-made island off the coast of southwest Florida.
During the residency Lewis and her long-time collaborators Dirk Bell, Marcelo Alcaide, LABOUR, and Sissel Tolaas will experiment with various embodied creative practices towards the creation of new forms of intense aesthetic engagement that address a unified human sensorium and the development of new discourse that would serve to communicate, analyse and reflect critically on such compositions. The resdiency activities will interweave for example taste, sound, and movement as well as ecological research conducted with olfaction and other experiences that work towards rehabilitating touch, smell, taste and a sense of ritual in a contemporary context for a detraditionalized society bombarded with information and sexuality but short on possibilities for reflection, cultivation and sensuality. This project interrogates contemporary practices of sight and vision and asks how we might see or become more receptive if we would shape our practices of attention differently.