BOOK: Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Phaidon Publications

“Lili Reynaud-Dewar” by Phaidon Publications is the first book to document her remarkable career. Lili Reynaud-Dewar became an artist relatively late in life, having first studied ballet in her hometown of La Rochelle on France’s Atlantic coast, before switching to law at the Sorbonne in Paris, then enrolling at Glasgow School of Arts in 2001. She was one of the four nominees for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2021 and won it. She works in performance, sculpture and the moving image has often touched on historical figures and performers. Reynaud Dewar’s primary interests and methodologies, research and performance, are common in recent art. But she does not employ history as either a stationary formal device or nostalgic lens; instead, she transforms myriad histories into new works that walk directly into the (or some) future. Similarly, her investment in a kind of politicized vaudevillian theatre – an anachronism in today’s art world – sets her apart. It makes sense, then, that her work evokes literary and theatrical predecessors. Her twining of technology with racial and sexual politics conjures the speculative writing of Donna Haraway and Octavia Butler, who use science and sci-fi to transcend issues of injustice. Reynaud Dewar’s theatrical roots appear to lie with Bertolt Brecht and Rainer Werner Maria Fassbinder, after whose ‘Antiteater’ troupe she titled an exhibition. But despite these influences, and the complicated histories they limn, the artist’s works, complex and dauntingly expert, appear to travel relentlessly forward, prescient preambles of we know not what.-Dimitris Lempesis