Who I Am Tomorrow, 2018, Lique Schoot, 5min 30sec

‘While making my daily photograph, I realize that I will never know who I am tomorrow’

The Slideshow Movie ‘Who Am I Tomorrow’ shows 100 Self-portraits from the LS diaries of Lique Schoot, made between 2005 and 2018. The photographs in the visual diary record her existence in one frame a day. They are made with an analogue compact camera, always at arms-length and titled by date (year – month – day). Daily moments are shown in a vulnerable and honest way.

Click here for website LS diaries Project

Who Am I Tomorrow from Lique Schoot on Vimeo.

Lique Schoot (NL, 1969) was born in Arnhem-NL, the city where she currently lives and works. She received her Bachelor Degree from ArtEZ (Academy of Visual Arts, NL) in 1997.

Lique is a multidisciplinary artist. She works in the tradition of conceptual art. Since her graduation, she has used the self-portrait as a vehicle for exploring the nature of existence. Her work shows relevant issues; such as identity and gender.

The starting point for her work consists in the LS diaries, a visual diary in progress, started in 2003. The archive contains more than five thousand pictures showing daily moments of Lique at arm’s length. Every day one photo is taken with an analogue camera and titled by date (year, month, and day).

The LS data shows her entire, growing œuvre, encompassing painting, photography, objects, installations, video, site-specific, and digital art. Her work explores the dual nature of identity as simultaneously the perpetual reinvention of the self and an equally willful projection of the other. Common emotions and great themes emerge from the quiet simplicity and persistence of her imagery.

After her graduation in painting, photography and objects, her work was nominated and awarded several times, in- and outside the Netherlands. Since then Lique’s work has been featured in exhibitions in museums including the Valkhof Museum, the Bommel van Dam Museum, the Gorcums Museum and CODA Museum in the Netherlands; Koehnline Museum of Art and Phoenix Art Museum in the USA; FeliXart Museum, Be-Part, Museum SONS in Belgium and Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Germany.
Her work has also been exhibited in galleries and art fairs around the world including Chicago, New York, Düsseldorf, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague.

Works are included in museum collections in- and outside the Netherlands.

In 2016 she received a Working Grant for Established Artists from the Mondriaan Fund.

#PERFECT BODY Project, 2019, Alena Pratasevich

For the last few years I’ve been researching Ebay resource, Photographic images section. By sending a simple request #PERFECT BODY, I compiled a visual digital archive. Image sellers defined the image as a perfect body. As a result of the author’s “hashtag dialogue” with Ebay, a collection, an archive of virtual images, appeared. It consists of a few hundred pictures and every image of this collection is a pretender for perfection.

The radical question of this project is: Does the perfect body exist?

Yes, it does.

Not according to the concept or category, but to its existence. Image sellers use “perfect” as a rating of goods in a situation of exchange. An infinite exchange, important for capitalism, because the goods must be reproduced again and again. By selling the “perfect body” they sign a Body Agreement with a special form of ideal existence with the buyer, for each individual image, but which in its turn obeys a more general agreement stating that the perfect (ideal) body exists.

I suggest involving viewers into the audience performance, setting a difficult challenge for them: to face the choice deciding the perfect (ideal) body from the options presented. The outcome of the viewers’ elections will become that collective ideal body that does not apply to a single image, but is fair to all of them. This is a dangerous collision. An encounter with an ideal body should actually cause a feeling of anxiety and danger. … we are enchanted, seduced and, finally, frightened. The soul falls backwards (Plotinus). In other words, we lose consciousness, the type of consciousness that we use to establish our human essence.

Dear viewer, I propose you to join the GALLERY and examine the virtual archive of #PERFECT BODY project. In order to make your own choice of the ideal body, please, press PERFECT BODY! button under the preferred image.

Alena Pratasevich is a Photographer, artist and curator. She was born in 1979 in Minsk, Belarus. This year she curated the Belarus Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. She has been included in group exhibitions across Europe. 2019 Genitive. She has curated many exhibitions across Belarus.. 2019 The Scratch,  solo exhibition by Igor Savchenko, Museum of the Belarusian Cinema History, Minsk, Belarus. 2019  Genitive. Part 2. The National center of contemporary arts, Minsk, Belarus. 2015-2017 Concrete Delusion, international art-project by Manuel Schroeder, curator of belarussian group, Belarus/Germany.