Luzia Simons (Ceará, 1953). Lives and works in Berlin.
Identity as a sociocultural construction has been central to Luzia Simons’ work since the start of her career in the mid-1990s, in Europe. She has lived abroad since 1976, first in France before settling in Germany, in the mid-1980s. Her own cultural miscegenation has served as a springboard for her works which include photography, performance and films. Inspired by the practice of photograms, recorded on photographic paper without a camera, introduced by Man Ray, Simon has developed her own form of photography, the scanogram; a new “way of seeing”, with no viewpoint or central focus, as is customary with a photographic lens. In this methodology, objects are placed directly on a huge industrial scanner, which reproduces the pixels in the smallest detail and reveals linear games with light. The scanograms, blown up to large scale and given dramatic, baroque-style lighting, inhabit a space between the simple recording and the metaphor. Not by chance, Simons found in tulips a perfect vehicle to question the notion of identity and through them expose a metaphor for globalization. Native of Iran and Turkey and taken to Holland, these flowers have become an object of desire and social status symbol. Through the gigantic enlargements of the different arrangements, Simons retrieves the Dutch still life tradition, freezing in time the ephemeral and fleeting by questioning our roots and identity in the globalized world, in this era of ultramobility and transmedia storytelling.
Identity as a sociocultural construction has been central to Luzia Simons’ work since the start of her career in the mid-1990s, in Europe. She has lived abroad since 1976, first in France before settling in Germany, in the mid-1980s. Her own cultural miscegenation has served as a springboard for her works which include photography, performance and films. Inspired by the practice of photograms, recorded on photographic paper without a camera, introduced by Man Ray, Simon has developed her own form of photography, the scanogram; a new “way of seeing”, with no viewpoint or central focus, as is customary with a photographic lens. In this methodology, objects are placed directly on a huge industrial scanner, which reproduces the pixels in the smallest detail and reveals linear games with light. The scanograms, blown up to large scale and given dramatic, baroque-style lighting, inhabit a space between the simple recording and the metaphor. Not by chance, Simons found in tulips a perfect vehicle to question the notion of identity and through them expose a metaphor for globalization. Native of Iran and Turkey and taken to Holland, these flowers have become an object of desire and social status symbol. Through the gigantic enlargements of the different arrangements, Simons retrieves the Dutch still life tradition, freezing in time the ephemeral and fleeting by questioning our roots and identity in the globalized world, in this era of ultramobility and transmedia storytelling.
