Lizza May David

Chains of interest
ifa-Galerie Berlin (30.09.2022 – 22.01.2023)

With Chains of Interest, Isaac Chong Wai, Lizza May David, Wilhelm Klotzek, Ofri Lapid, Adrien Missika and Gitte Villesen continue their personal explorations of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen art collection. In the preceding exhibition Spheres of interest*, the artists activated and contextualised selected works in performative and narrative formats, providing critical and humorous insights as well as illuminating omissions and political entanglements within the collection's unique history. Chains of interest presented newly developed works that reflect the artists' research and correspond with works from the collection.

Lizza May David's new painting depicts sonorous mmmms inspired by indigenous songs and myths from two distant Pacific coasts. Motivated by the unused drawer labelled "Asia" at the ifA depot in Stuttgart, David depicted to present the textual-visual works of Chinese-Filipino artist Elisa Tan to symbolically occupy this unfilled space. Tan's "contains for thought" show imagined and inscribed landscapes, recalling the linguistic terrains of Carlfriedrich Claus, which estrange the viewer from familiar ways of seeing, writing and reading.