Estonian multimedia artist Kris Lemsalu's feminist-themed installation for the 58th Venice Biennale Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu (born 1985) is known for her installations, mixed-media sculptures and performances underscored by feminist themes. This book offers an overview, focusing in particular on Lemsalu's largest project Birth V: Hi and Bye, produced for the Estonian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale.
The Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu creates complex sculptures, installations, and performances that fuse the animal kingdom with humankind, nature with the artificial, beauty with repulsion, lightness with gravity, life with death. She revives traditional techniques and methods to combine animal bodies and porcelain objects with found (natural) materials such as furs, leather, seashells, wool, or paper in theatrical installations that whisk us off into a world of the fantastic imagination. Spanning a wide range of media and modes of production, Lemsalu's multifaceted oeuvre incorporates elements from performance art, found objects, manufactured pieces, and music. Her multimedia creations attest to her passion for detail, hinting at a critique of society by revealing tensions between the politics of gender, art-making, nature, and time-honored craftsmanship. Lemsalu is fascinated by the possibility of making objects that are not aestheticized - their physical presence is narrative rather than representational. In her self-portraits, she often reinvents herself as a creature blending masculine with feminine features, surrounding herself with a new reality whose complexion and character are perpetually shifting. „Some works somehow demand my bodily presence.“ (Kris Lemsalu)