Study Now Steady

Center for Art, Research and Alliances, presents the first solo exhibition of artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis (b. 1983, Santo Domingo; lives and works in Berlin). Titled Study Now Steady, the exhibition presents a new series of live rehearsals, building upon scores of Lewis's previous work, as well as newly commissioned video work. In Study Now Steady time loops and bends, creating a space of intention outside of linearity where performers and spectators must attend to the body as both a troubled archive and polyphonic chorus. Without simple narrative resolution, Lewis’s performances reject the politics of representation, touted as “progress” by colonial systems that use the rhetoric of inclusion as a means of maintaining ultimate power. Lewis’ practice probes questions of revenge and repair in search of that which has not yet been destroyed. Dance, in Lewis’s practice, is a mode of embodied and collaborative study, building from histories housed in flesh. There is wisdom stored and transmitted in the process of shared movement— learned through lineage and experimentation. Ligia Lewis works as an artist, choreographer, and dancer conceiving and directing experimental performances. Her works are presented either on stage, in a gallery, in a museum, or in a film or exhibition format. Lewis’s works are often marked by physical and emotional intensities by which comedy and tragedy collide. Through her work, performer and audience alike confront a confluence of processes that disrupt normative conceptions of the body while she negotiates the ghostly traces of history, memory, and the un/known. Her expressive concepts give form to movement, speech, affects, thoughts, relations, and utterances within a highly defined choreographic landscape. Held together by the logic of interdependence, disorder, and play, she creates space(s) for the emergent and the indeterminate while tending to the mundane. In her work, sonic and visual metaphors meet the body, materializing the enigmatic, the poetic, and the dissonant. Her work slides between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Lewis’s work continues to evoke the nuances of embodiment. Lewis recently finished works including: “A Plot / A Scandal” (2022), Still Not Still” (2021), “deader than dead” (2020), the trilogy: “Water Will (in Melody)” (2018), “minor matter” (2016), and “Sorrow Swag” (2014). In the fall, she will open her first solo exhibition, “study now steady” at CARA in NYC (US). A survey of her stage works will be presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, DE) in November 2023.

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