Wiebke Leister

Echoes and Afterlives

This ongoing piece of work looks at the boundaries between embalming and enmasking: being in a skin and under a skin, in and under a mask, looking at a mask and seeing through a mask as something that equally changes one’s gait and one’s voice while playing with sensations of displacement and transformation. It treats the human face less as a façade but rather as an object that – even though central to our understanding of what it means to be human – is only ever in the process of approximating a subject: being filled by a subject, worn on the face of a subject. A process of becoming invested with meaning that might happen during the encounter with an image-object, possibly inverting the relationship of who sees and what can be seen.

About the Artist

Wiebke Leister is a German artist and writer based in London. She is course leader for MA Photography at London College of Communication, co-organizer of the Photography and the Contemporary Imaginary Research Hub and core member of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at University of the Arts London. Her research investigates conditions of photographic Non-Likeness, in particular presentations of expressive signs of the face in relation to its facial canvas.