Isabelle Lutz

steamed pumpkin’s squids

series of photographs, ongoing since 2012.

Woman in a red-trimmed black military jacket and dark satin gown, wearing mirrored eyewear, in an abandoned industrial space.
Woman with dark hair looking down, wearing a garment made of raw chicken carcasses draped over her shoulder and chest.

ALDI’S CHICKENS IN LOVE [behind the scenes]

Video 2mn40-loop, 2012.

ALDI’S CHICKENS IN LOVE [behind the scenes]

Video 2mn40-loop, 2012.

Raw chicken pieces with traces of blood lying on a stained floor beneath a streaked white wall corner.

the feminine is the product of a historical and social construct as well as of systems of representation and a plurality of narratives, both symbolic and political, which shape its place within a subordinate condition.

Woman in a bronze satin gown pushing a nude mannequin on a hand-cart across a leaf-covered ground by a weathered wall.

VISIBILITY WITHOUT SURRENDER

There is a long history of the impact images have on women.

This distinction, which feminist theory has taken decades to formulate precisely, lies at the heart of Isabelle Lutz’s practice: a body of installations (video, photography, multimedia) that takes as its raw material not the female body per se, but the system of conventions that renders it visible and, in so doing, instrumentalises it — reduces it to a sign whose legibility is conditioned by the viewer’s subjectivity. […]

Portrait of a woman with ‘smoky eyes’ make-up, a red ball on her forehead, a fencing mask and a silver pleated outfit, looking through a hole.
Concrete wall with a mouse-ear opening framing a woman's face under a golden afro wig, beside round windows and cat stencil.

the na-na’s exist as identities awaiting their own space, which is that of installations.

[…] it is there, at the heart of the spatial dispositif, within the duration and the viewer’s experience, that they unfold what they are: constructions that render visible the very process of their making. The costume is not a disguise — it is a demonstration that every body in the public sphere is an artifice.

[…] What distinguishes this approach from a purely critical art — from an act that would be content to denounce — is that it does not renounce visual pleasure, humour, or formal energy. The na-na’s are inhabited figures, endowed with a sense of irony and, at times, a quiet violence.

Woman with a blonde afro wig and beige dress standing in an industrial space, holding a leash attached to a swan.

on parallax.

Two mirrored profiles of a woman with a black bob and black-painted jaw and neck, a 'do not disturb' sign between them.

SCOPIC REGIMES AND THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE

na-na, with its hyphen, its repetition, its resemblance to a refusal uttered in a low voice.

Black-and-white image of a wooden plank beside a woman's face emerging from darkness, wearing a ruffled collar.
Person in a wolf mask and mint jumpsuit in a raw concrete space, near 'Totem' and 'taboo & marylou' signs.

the body as artifice

revisiting the codes of representation — the pose, the costume, the framing, the gaze into the camera.

the frame as politics

questioning the prescriptive matrices that have organised the visibility of the feminine.

Woman in a dark blue dress against a red-tiled wall, with insets showing an illustration of a figure in a bird headdress.

yet what unfolds behind the scenes functions here as an off-screen element — a stratum that emerges where the final form had to sacrifice its earlier stages in order to come into being.

Pencil sketch of a girl's face with large eyes, taped to the wall in a plastic sleeve against a black background.
Dada-style collage: woman in pink glasses surrounded by surreal cutouts—a monkey, dangling legs, a rabbit, and text banners.
Woman in a doorway feeding a black dog, another woman's face in the door's window, 'LIFE' logo above.

magazine covers and popular formats

as recurring representational devices through which femininity has been staged, codified and made legible according to unspoken rules that no one has ever openly enunciated.

Collage titled 'Myths' with a woman in an ornate headpiece, a clawed illustrated figure, a raccoon, and a white wolf.
Close-up of a woman's face with dark eye makeup and coral paint smeared across it, against a black background.
Mock 'Time' cover: woman in a red gown near an elephant and white dog, forest scene through a doorway.

na-na, in its phonetic proximity to “no-no“, is no longer just a nickname

The insolence lies in this subtle reversal: taking up a condescending name, countering its authority, then breaking free from the codes to the point of making the signifier itself the site of a claim and formal insubordination.

A close-up portrait of a woman wearing a jet-black bob wig and white lipstick, as well as black tribal paint covering half her face and her neck.

and convergence.

the na-na’s exist as active forces — neither victims nor heroines — that know the rules, and choose how to play with them without dissolving into them.

[…] Cinema, and more specifically what Laura Mulvey termed the “male gaze“, has historically organised visual pleasure around a vision moulded by male desire, in which women often become both spectacle and receptacle inside a closed economy of looking.

A na-na’s parallax has emerged from this ambivalence and stands in opposition to this unnamed violence. The occupation of space is thus no longer ornamental: it becomes an affirmation. The na-na is not merely represented; she is modulated, performed and, through the repetition of the pattern, thwarts attempts at appropriation.

It is therefore not simply a matter of placing female figures within the field of the picture, but of altering the scopic regime that ordinarily constitutes them as surfaces of projection, down to the silent grammar through which visibility is granted.

Parallax intervenes here as a critical operation: it shifts the angle of perception, decentres the authority of the spectator and substitutes, for the motif offered up for identification or desire, a device of counter-address, capable of undermining the anchor point from which the image is consumed. […]

beyond the male gaze

The mediated female body is never simply shown — it is always formatted.

Woman with platinum hair and blue makeup, wearing a black-and-cream sweater, standing among white hydrangeas.
Woman with teal eye makeup, a black pillbox hat, and a purple satin coat, resting a wooden mannequin hand on a table.
Climate-themed collage with a polar bear, penguin, protest signs, cracked earth, and figures in surreal costumes.

performed

identities

THE FRAME AS POLITICS

CAPTIVE GRAMMARS…

the na-

na’s.