A Plot A Scandal (2023) was filmed within the medieval town of Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy, a site Ligia Lewis sees as upholding "Eurocentric ideals of (white) Man's dominion over the land." One recurring aspect of the landscape, the towering cypress trees ordered in rows, stands as an example. The film opens with the sonic resonance of the church bell revealed later as a towering monument, pointing to the Christian ideals that served as both a precursor to the Enlightenment and bedfellow in maintaining its hierarchical order. Weaving together multiple historical epics and political and mythical narratives, the work uses ideas of spectacle and scandal to point toward  the continued dispossession of "Europe's Others", as Lewis describes them. "Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? Is it the demand for repair? Or the otherwise brutish desire for revenge?" Lewis explores these questions via a narrative that brings together philosopher and beneficiary of the transatlantic trade in enslaved people John Locke and his interest in the relationship between life, liberty, and property, the Cuban artist and revolutionary José Aponte, as well as her great-grandmother Lolón Zapata.

* Opening ||| Wednesday, 3 July, H. 7 PM *

Ligia Lewis (b. 1983 in Santo Domingo) works as an artist, choreographer, and dancer, conceiving and directing experimental performances. Her works have been presented on stages, galleries, museums, as film or installations. Lewis’s works are often marked by physical and emotional intensities in which comedy and tragedy collide. Through her work, the performer and the audience confront a confluence of processes that disrupt normative conceptions of the body as she negotiates the ghostly traces of history and memory. In the Fall of 2023, she presented her first solo exhibition, study now steady at CARA in NYC (US) as well as a survey of her stage works at HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin, DE). Lewis recently finished works including: A Plot / A Scandal (2022), Still Not Still (2021), deader than dead (2020), Sensation 1 / This Interior (High Line Commission, 2019), the trilogy: Water Will (in Melody) (2018), so something happened, get over it; no, nothing happened, get with it (2018), minor matter (2016), and Sorrow Swag (2014).
A Plot A Scandal is part of this year's Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better than the Real Thing programme at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lewis is the recipient of the Tabori Award in the category of Distinction (2021); a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants Award (2018); a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production for minor matter (2017); a Factory Artist residency at Tanzhaus NRW (2017-19); and a Prix Jardin d’ Europe from ImPulsTanz for Sorrow Swag (2015). Lewis lives and works in Berlin.