NOWNES(S(ESS_

The title of LETHE’s work for PROTOZONE 4 : EXTRA WORLDING refers to a caring attention to presence (NOWNESS) as primary material for world-making. It also references author N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth, in which (SESS)-ing supports the main characters and their kin as a special endowment that is strictly controlled by humans in power. In Jemisin’s world, the faculty of sessing means the ability to feel and act upon a wide variety of geological processes such as shifing, growing and altering the course of tectonic plates.

Until the 16th century, the color orange had no proper name in Europe, but was called yellow-red. Orange is the color of both the sunrise and the sunset. – Embodied liminality is what gives shape to the constellation of Izidora L LETHE’s contributed works for this exhibition.

_ (SUNRISE(SET —An orange light spilling through the crack of a slight open door. The lightspill may be making present the space between the exhibitionspace and the outside, pointing at the occurence of air, light and now-time.

_ (OPENINGS —A semi-translucent drawing backlit by orange neon-light. The graphite drawing points to semi-fictive/semi-real semi-abstract and semi-figurative openings, oriphices, maybe volcanic craters or places of entry.

_ (FOLDS —A grouping of ceramic forms placed on the between-space of the exhibition, surrounded by green plants, lit by soft yellow-reds. The forms are only to be seen through glass panels evoking a space for consensual being looked at – or terrarium. Between creature and static object, the works hoan in on the materiality of soil and the skinfold or -orifice.

Izidora L LETHE is a transdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Their practice spans choreography, sculpture and video, accompanied by correspondent writing and drawing processes. In their research-based works, LETHE returns to the body as a site of knowledge-production and repository. Aiming at undermining naturalized hierarchies, LETHE develops works with and through the body, allowing space for it to access and ‚speak‘ its own vocabulary. In particular, LETHE aims to uplift queer, female, non-binary/trans*, postcolonial and post-migrant epistemologies, which have systematically been overlooked and undervalued.

Izidora L LETHE received their MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 2017) and their BFA from Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK, 2013). Their most recent exhibitions include Cabaret Voltaire at Monte Verità (Switzerland) (2021), the Leslie Lohman Museum (New York City) (2021); The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM, San Francisco, CA) (2019-2020) et al. LETHE is the recipient of the independent artist residency at the BANFF Centre for the Arts in Canada (2018) and the IMA fellowship program of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA, 2019).

LETHE has been teaching as visiting faculty in the ART+ART HISTORY department at the University of Washington (UW, Seattle), the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and F+F (Zürich) among others. Currently, LETHE is based in Zürich.