Laida Lertxundi Screening

LUX Scotland presents a selection of works by the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Laida Lertxundi. The screening includes a body of short films made between 2007 and 2016, and is presented to coincide with her solo exhibition at Tramway, WORDS, PLANETS (21 June – 1 July 2018).

Laida Lertxundi is best known for her beautiful and enigmatic 16mm films, which bring together ideas from conceptual art and structural film with a radical, embodied, feminist perspective. Shot in and around Los Angeles, where she has lived and worked for over a decade, Lertxundi’s films might be described as ​‘emotional cartographies’. Moving between intimate interior architectures and the magnitude of open landscapes, they map out a geography transformed by affective and subjective states.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between the artist and Nicole Yip, Director of LUX Scotland.

Programme:

Footnotes to a House of Love, 2007. 16mm, 13 min.Cry When it Happens /​Llora Cuando Te Pase, 2010.16mm, 14 min.The Room Called Heaven, 2012. 16mm, 11 min.Vivir para Vivir /​Live to Live, 2015. 16mm, 11 min.025 Sunset Red, 2016. 16mm, 14 min.

Total running time: 63 min

Laida Lertxundi (b. Bilbao, 1981) works with moving image, photography and printmaking, documenting the Californian landscape while engaging with questions of affect and subjectivity in relation to geography. Her main body of work is shot on 16mm film in a process that she calls ​‘Landscape Plus’, which combines filmic records of people and places with an emphasis on diegetic sound and music, resulting in languid passages of cinematic language, bodily desire and existential awareness. She employs a fragmentary approach to editing in which cinematic forms of storytelling are replaced by a focus on process and materiality. Her work highlights the tension between form and the experience that will always exceed it.

Lertxundi received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Bard College. She has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2017); fluent, Santander (2017); Tabakalera, San Sebastián (2017); Tate Modern, London (2016); Vdrome (2014); La Alhondiga, Bilbao (2014); and Marta Cervera Contemporary, Madrid (2013). Her work has been featured in Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Bienal de La Habana, Cuba (2015); Al’s Grand Hotel, Frieze Projects, New York, (2014); LIAF Biennial, Norway (2013); the Lyon Biennale (2013); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012).

She teaches on the Fine Art and Humanities programmes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and is Chair of the Filmmaking and Moving Image Department at Elias Querejeta Film School in San Sebastián.