Alexandra Lerman

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Alexandra Lerman lives and works between St Petersburg and New York. In her practice, she explores historical moments in which natural ecosystems, language, bodily gesture, and expressive freedom come into conflict with the corporate and governmental systems of control. Lerman’s work has been shown at the SculptureCenter, Tina Kim Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Whitney Museum, New Museum in New York, Signal Center, Sweden, MUSAC in Spain, the Museum of Hygiene in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art.

Recommended by Masha Godovannaya

DreamDoc: Uzhgorod, 2020. This film was created during the COVID pandemic over several remote meetings with artists from Uzhgorod, Ukraine

DreamDoc: Uzhgorod, 2020. DreamDoc originated from the proposition that during sleep, humanity experiences a sort of collective dream, and within this collaboratively sourced mindscape each person is only able to see a fragment of the whole narrative

Soldiers of the Sun, or the Right to the Future Time, 2019. Museum of Hygiene, St Petersburg, Contemporary Art in Traditional Museum Festival. This site-specific installation subverts the anthropocentricism of the museum collection

Soldiers of the Sun, or the Right to the Future Time, 2019. This cyanotype is an image of Giant Hogweed—invasive, photo-toxic species still infesting post-Soviet territories after they were imported into the Soviet Union as experimental livestock feed

Self-Portrait as Pavlov’s Dog, 2019. Here, Lerman reminds us of our newly developed algorithmically-conditioned addiction to social media, the new technological conditioning

The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed video, 2019. The title is a reference to the Genesis song The Return of Giant Hogweed about a Russian plant taking over the human race

The Return of the Return of the Giant Hogweed video, 2019. The video version of the story is told from the point of view of the plants that speak Russian

Tree Time, 2020. This project imagines a relationship between nature and technology unmediated by human presence

Tree Time, 2020. The video was shot in the Amazon rainforest from a disembodied point of view of a drone

Tree Time, 2020. This artificial observer envisages a different form of time: one that cannot be measured and is devoid of the narrative punctuation of seasons

Janus, 2015 Named after the two-faced Roman god of passages and transitions, this video installation consists of two projectors representing the past and the future

Janus, 2015. Janus is a visual essay on the mind-body dichotomy that invokes ancient mythology as well as science fiction

Swipe, Swipe, Swipe, 2017. Signal Center of Contemporary Art, Malmö. This project explores the invisible abstraction of contract law between the movement of human fingers and the smartphone screen

Swipe, Swipe, Swipe, 2017. Signal Center of Contemporary Art, Malmö. Here, Apple-owned “swipe,” “slide to unlock,” and “pinch-to-zoom” gestures that are performed by millions every day are imprinted in clay

Swipe, Swipe, Swipe, 2017. Signal Center of Contemporary Art, Malmö. The colour of the wall, Rose Gold, was invented by Peter Carl Fabergé and was appropriated by Apple. It is also referred to as the “millennial pink” or “Russian gold”

New East Digital Archive