ART CITIES: London-Louisa Clement
Louisa Clement’s practice delves into the ever-shifting notion of identity as our society gets confronted with new forms of communication, standardisation and recognition brought along by the digital age. Through photography, video, sculpture, installation and VR, her practice questions physicality and the dynamics of collective interaction at a time where the virtual has long outgrown its own sphere and the fragile categories of individual and reality escape their traditional paradigms.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Annka Kultys Gallery Archive
Louisa Clement’s essential aim at dissolving defined structures is also emphasized by the constant swinging of her work between abstraction and figuration and by her making use of a broad range of media to mimic the fluidity of the subject she examines, which indirectly reflects the extent of her investigation rooted in the fluctuating and networked condition of our times. Louisa Clement’s solo exhibition is a new body of work that extents over about 115 frames. Certainly. The frames hold intimate close-ups of the artist’s body—fragments, surfaces, skin. Etched onto the glass is text, seared in with laser, delicate yet irreversible. These words speak of a rupture: a slow, relentless loss of true knowledge in a world increasingly governed by algorithmic logic and synthetic speech. In this digital unraveling, facts dissolve into fiction, and fabricated truths take root—burning themselves into the collective memory, endlessly regenerated by machines that speak without knowing. What we once felt, sensed, and knew in our bodies is slipping away. Comfort-seeking and convenience-bound, humanity turns ever more to generative texts and digital proxies, seduced by the illusion of ease. But in doing so, we drift further from the origin of knowledge—from the flesh, from intuition, from what lives in the marrow of our being. Knowledge is not merely cognitive; it is visceral. It pulses through us. It shapes our judgments, our instincts, our sense of right and wrong. Emotion, empathy, memory—these, too, are physical, summoned from within, called up through sensation and presence. In this work, the body becomes both vessel and metaphor—a map of knowing, and a site of violation. The artist weaves together the physical body with the body of knowledge, overlaying, entangling them. When knowledge is tampered with, distorted, or stripped away, the body too is wounded. Autonomy is threatened. The texts inscribed in glass emerge from a space of pain, warning, grief, and a deeply somatic response. They are lamentations for something being lost—not only information, but the very capacity to feel, act, and relate freely. This erosion of embodied knowledge is, for the artist, a quiet catastrophe—one that unfolds beneath the surface of our daily lives, as insidiously urgent as climate collapse or war. It speaks to a larger question of what we are becoming, of where we are heading, and how we are unlearning our proximity to one another. The scale of the installation, the number of frames, is a quiet insistence: this crisis is real, and we are dangerously close to a point of no return. Silence is no longer an option. The installation is accompanied by the video work “believers” (2023)—a synthetic church service, eerily modeled after rituals practiced in some Korean congregations. A generated sermon explores the triad of body, soul, and mind. It speaks, paradoxically, of human connection, of togetherness as the root of community. Yet the sermon itself is void of flesh, delivered by artificial ‘priests’ conjured entirely by machines. The performance folds in on itself, revealing the absurdity of disembodied faith and the hollow echo of synthetic intimacy. Within the animation appears a sculpture: the mold of a reborn doll—a haunting imitation of an infant, eerily lifelike, eerily still. It stands as an emblem of absence, a symbol of what has been lost or perhaps never fully known. Together, these works form a meditation on the dissolution of knowledge, the disembodiment of truth, and the fading presence of the human in the age of automation. They are a cry, a call, a gesture toward remembering what it means to know with the body—to feel, to think, to act as whole, sentient beings.
Photo: Louisa Clement, Exhibition mockup
Info: Annka Kultys Gallery, Unit 9 472 Hackney Road, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 6/6-19/7/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.annkakultys.com/
