News: As You Were (2024) - new moving image work.
As You Were (2024)
[47:57min, HD, single channel, stereo. Eng w/ closed captions.]
Themes: Intimacy; Archive; Institutions; Women’s Healthcare; Professional identity.
How do our private experiences inform our professional selves that through our institutions impact the lives of others?
As You Were has its own webpage here>
Above Image: Listening Forward Symposium, IMPULS Festival, 2023.
Image credit: Helena Majewska
Plants, Humans, Institutions
IMPULS festival, Leipzig. 12-14 Okt 2023.
Plants, Humans, Institutions is a new performance lecture on Voice by artist filmmaker Lyndsay Mann. How do institutional agendas shape how we talk to each other and to ourselves? This presentation uses Botany as a framework to query representations of science, institutional histories, nativeness and the bodily experience of belonging. Commissioned by curator Julian Reiken.
Review (excerpt) of Florilegium: A Gathering of Flowers by Genevieve Fay
Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh 16 Oct - 13 Dec 2020.
“…The work of both Annalee Davis and Lyndsay Mann anchors the exhibition in something deeper, bringing the role of the Botanic Garden, the collection of plants, the colonial ecosystem at the heart of RBGE’s existence, into view. … Davis’ art works in dialogue with Lyndsay Mann’s A Desire for Organic Order (2016), a mesmerising film of 55 minutes which explores the RBGE’s Herbarium, where species of preserved plants are kept for study and research. Although most visitors won’t have time watch the film from start to finish, it’s a fascinating piece, which shines a light on the strangeness of it all: the meticulously categorised, catalogued, classified plants, sitting in row upon row of filing cabinets and box files, the collection expanding over the centuries as new species are found and brought to the RBGE, their final resting place.
The violence surrounding these collections is examined at a distance, with the narrator’s voice dispassionately implying but never quite explaining what we know now, that far more care was given to these foreign plants than to the humans who lived alongside them. If you do have the chance to sit here a while, I’m sure it will make you see the exhibition, and the whole RBGE endeavour, in a slightly different light. You may not think you need this part of your world to be challenged, that you just want to enjoy the Botanics and not think too much about the difficult history and context. But it’s the ability of artists to show things you thought you knew in a new way, that is what makes them so vital to how we think about our past, present and future. That’s why we need the upper floor of the exhibition. We can’t just have a “gathering of flowers”, we need someone to tell us what they mean.” Link to full article