The installation deals metaphorically with the relationship we have with our own image, which is nowadays being continuously archived and updated on social media.
The self-image developed in this way has given rise to an avatar, an “augmented” double that we have grown used to modelling by means of various virtual devices, notably digital filters.
In a contemporary, empty interior, overlooking a large bay window, two women of different ages with identical feature face each other around a tub in which the tears of the sobbing younger woman are collected. They will serve as a beauty elixir for the older woman.
In this familiar and disturbing nocturnal atmosphere, a making-up ritual takes place. What are we witnessing from the outside, through the glass window?
Evoking the myth of Narcissus, the tale of Snow White, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and the digital filters used on social networks to enhance appearance, the videos alternate between desolation and appeasement. By creating a space of overlapping levels of reality, Invisible Filter disturbingly poses the eternal problem of self-image.
Ethel Lilienfeld (1995) is a French visual artist and video maker living in Brussels. She obtained her MFA in Sculpture at La Cambre in 2020 (atelier of Johan Muyle) then took the Agrégation in 2021. The winner of several awards (Audience Award, Brussels Videonline Festival #2, 2021; LA CENTRALE - Prix Cocof [Comission Communautaire Française] at La Médiatine, 2021; Prix des Amis de la Cambre, 2020), Lilienfeld's work explores notions of identity, femininity and intergenerational family transmissions. The body plays an important role in most of the artist’s pieces. Although she uses photography, sound installation and video, her devices are nonetheless related to sculpture and the relationship to space is crucial. In her videos, Lilienfeld modulates her actors, drawing sometimes on fiction and sometimes on reality as she puts in place the sets and objects.
CursusAprès avoir débuté son parcours dans une école de mode à Paris (la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne en 2014), Ethel Lilienfeld poursuit son chemin dans l’atelier Sculpture dirigé par Johan Muyle à La Cambre (ENSAV, Bruxelles en 2015). En 2018, elle part en Finlande six mois à la Kuvataideakatemia, Academy of Fine Arts d’Helsinki, aux côtes de l’artiste vidéaste Salla Tykkä. Ethel Lilienfeld obtient son Master en Arts plastiques, visuels et de l'espace en 2020 puis l'AESS, titre d'agrégé de l'enseignement secondaire supérieur (BE) en 2021, une formation pédagogique complémentaire.
Production : Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains
