Liv Schulman - Le Goubernement

Liv Schulman : Le Goubernement

The Villa Vasillieff invites artist Liv Schulman to engage with the entire exhi­bi­tion space to pre­sent her new series of films: Le Goubernement. This six-episode fic­tion imag­ines the des­tiny and work of women, les­bian, queer, trans and non-binary artists who lived in Paris from 1910 – 1980. Le Goubernement puts for­ward a nar­ra­tion of engaged art and a new way of telling the story –– not through retracing falsely uni­versal events, fates or linear move­ments, but by cre­ating sto­ries that bring together mul­tiple sto­ries, images, thoughts, lan­guages and sen­sa­tions. The Goubernement is not a real­istic film, a period fic­tion, or a rational his­tory –– it is a film where speech, images and forms of words become char­ac­ters. For Liv Schulman, this film was an occa­sion to create new rep­re­sen­ta­tions of female, les­bian, queer, trans and non-binary artists; of images, not con­structed in an oppo­si­tional vacuum (one man, one woman etc.,) but elab­o­rated autonomously, out­side the forms of phal­lo­cratic dis­course.

The episodes tra­verses and overlay over 70 years of his­tory and hosts the sto­ries and fate of artists that were erased from the great twen­tieth cen­tury mod­ernist nar­ra­tive, such as Maria Vassilieff, Esther Carp, Maria Blanchard, Carol Rama, Claude Cahun, Suzanne Malhberbe, Marcelle Cahn, Pan Yuliang, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Shirley Goldfarb, Germaine Richier and Françoise Adnet.

Real sto­ries and anec­dotes from the lives of these artists mix with fic­tion in tem­po­ral­i­ties that inter­weave and amal­ga­mate into a dubious pre­sent. There are more than forty-five char­ac­ters who are played by seven actresses and artists: Eden Tinto-Collins, Agathe Paysan, Catherine Hargreaves, Chloe Giraud, Manuela Guevara, Viviana Méndez Moya (Curtis Putralk) and Nicole Mersey. As often in her work, Liv Schulman does not elab­o­rate a linear, rational, log­ical sto­ry—rather, the artist pro­poses a col­lec­tive con­struc­tion of the char­ac­ters that is the result of the pro­cess of prac­tice, during the shooting; the rehearsals; and impro­vi­sa­tion with the actresses. Here, iden­ti­ties cir­cu­late, evolve and some­times dis­solve, the char­ac­ters are some­times played by sev­eral dif­ferent actresses, some­times an actress plays sev­eral roles at one time. This cir­cu­la­tion of the very notion of iden­tity, and its social and psy­cho­log­ical con­struct, is at the heart of the artist’s inquiry. Through a fic­tional his­tor­ical revi­sion, Le Goubernement under­mines the offi­cial nar­ra­tives of the tri­umphalist his­to­ries and pro­poses a new his­tory of fem­i­nist art, one that allows all lib­er­ties, to the point of absur­dity.

Liv Schulman, still from Le Goubernement, 2019, artist’s courtesy, © ADAGP 2019