Lili Huston-Herterich

video , textiel , Soft sculptures , sculptuur , schrijven , performance , installatie , fotografie , Conceptueel

As an artist, I am concerned with how my work emerges in relation to space, histories, and other people, and how to maintain an awareness and acknowledgment of these relationships. I have a situated practice both materially and conceptually; I work with what I am in close proximity to in order to develop a dialogue from my current position historically, geographically, and economically. I am conscious of my role as a maker in a context of excess, and use capitalist culture's flotsam and jetsam to create work that radically reflects a dependency on the present. My research focuses on personal and political lineages of information: specifically on improvisational and dialogue-based methods of knowledge transmission. I work alone and with other people, with tactile materials and with performance, sound, and video.

**De Koffer en Het Kistje** - De Koffer en het Kistje is a text, sound and light work commissioned by Museum Jan Cunen on the occasion of the exhibition Puppet Masters, an exhibition focusing on puppets and their puppeteers. A puppet called Rimple is on permanent display in the main hall at Museum Jan Cunen (last images below). Rimple is a puppet made for Poppenheater Marag, a puppet theater founded by puppeteers and makers Margriet Pullens en Agnes Huygen in 1973 in the town of Oss, where the museum is located. Rimple was a main character in Marag's production, along with many other puppets that are not displayed alongside him. De Koffer en Het Kistje mounts existing puppets from the archive of Poppentheater Marag on display in the museum nearby Rimple. Their individual characters were researched independently and with the support of Evelien Pullens, puppeteer and daughter of Margriet. The puppets are put in conversation with a sound work in Dutch made with unprofessional actors, with synchronized LED lights that illuminate their faces when they speak. In a neighboring display case, a "chorus" joins them in song intermittently throughout their conversation. Their conversation is a debate: they discuss what it means to be exhibited as performance objects without being "alivened", or played.

**Script: De Koffer en Het Kistje** - Script to De Koffer en het Kistje, a text, sound and light work commissioned by Museum Jan Cunen on the occasion of the exhibition Puppet Masters, an exhibition focusing on puppets and their puppeteers. A puppet called Rimple is on permanent display in the main hall at Museum Jan Cunen (last images below). Rimple is a puppet made for Poppenheater Marag, a puppet theater founded by puppeteers and makers Margriet Pullens and Agnes Huygen in 1973 in the town of Oss, where the museum is located. The script is printed and on display near the installation. It has graphic and detailed footnotes in large margins which elaborates on the research origins – conversations, references, and personal anecdotes – that inform the character's lines.

**Pushing Up Daisies, 2025** - This performance departs from considering the fear of death as a symptom of Western society, where medicalization, social stigma, secularization, censorship of genocide, and self-optimization abstract one of the few experiences all living bodies share, with the privilege of time or distance, or through violent interruption. In the corner of a room that is lit with theater lights taht fade in and out and move, a quilted wooden stage waits for live intervention. In a series of four performance vignettes, a two-sided puppet serves as a messenger from a threshold between life and death, where they sit in perpetuity. As a performance, Pushing Up Daisies is 40-minutes in total, and comprises of four 10-minute chapters: American Yoga, where a puppet has a crisis in a CorePower yoga class; Towering People, where a puppet describes a dream of two funerals of public figures; Death Bed, where a puppet describes the way they would like to die; You Are A Stain, where a puppet sings a song. In the context of a weekend exhibition, the performances interrupted the exhibition twice daily.

**Janus, 2025** - Janus is an electronically modified found object that is a part of the body of work Pushing Up Daisies. The object "breathes" in synchronization with a sound work that fills the exhibition.

**It Doesn't Mean A Thing If It Doesn't Have That Swing** - It Doesn't Mean A Thing If It Doesn't Have That Swing is a part of the body of work Pushing Up Daisies. It is a welded steel panel that hangs from the wall from hinges. The text is the title of one of the three songs played as background tracks on a segment of American National Public Radio (NPR)'s daily show Marketplace, where the stock market numbers are read aloud. What song is played is dependent on whether the numbers are up, down, or "swinging".

**Contained Crazy Stage** - Contained Crazy Stage is a part of the body of work Pushing Up Daisies. The stage is made from oak, walnut, and cherry veneer in a pattern based on documentation of Contained Crazy quilts typical of the American Midwest.

**Fore and From, 2025** - Fore and From is a part of the body of work Pushing Up Daisies. This two-sided puppet serves as a messenger from a threshold between life and death, where they sit in perpetuity, during a performance of the same name.

**The Treasury, 2024** - The Treasury is a body of work that tells a story of Peg Miller, an American artist who lived in a bank building in Spring Green, Wisconsin for the last thirty years of her life. This neoclassical revival building was registered as a national historic site after her death, which I speculate would not have been possible without Peg’s occupancy. She used the bank as a home, a studio, and sometimes, a place to help other women maintain sobriety. Peg was a recovered alcoholic. The Treasury includes a 12-minute video work that uses puppets to tell anecdotes shared in interviews, alongside footage from inside the bank – which has been repurposed into a restaurant. Often historically used to share dissident stories, puppetry is used here to perform a collective recollection of an artist who survived addiction and made her own economy. A small history becomes a portrait of both an artists’ life and the disturbance of a financial institution’s transition. This is a memorial for a joyful misuse of space.

**Meeting of a Linden Tree, 2024** - Meeting of a Linden Tree is a work that was commissioned by Sammlung Philara on the occasion of the exhibition Cutting the Puppeteer's Strings, an exhibition focusing on marionettes and marionette theatre, shadow plays and puppetry, and associated aspects of staging, display and characters in contemporary art - where the traditional craft of puppet theater is currently receiving special attention. This work uses four puppets from the storage of the historic Düsseldorf Marionette Theatre (the character Momo from Momo, two Mephoisto puppets from Faust, G'Mork, a werewolf from The Neverending Story, and Molly, a train from Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer). The four marionettes hang from their strings in a circular formation with small LED bulbs that light when each one of them "speak". Their conversation, a sound work made with voice actors, is a debate: they discuss what it means to be exhibited as performance objects without being "alivened", or played. The script was developed through a series of conversations with artists, puppeteers, and researchers Pansee Atta, Aram Lee, Ada M. Patterson, and Nadia Ihjeij. The conversations focused on their personal relationships with exhibiting their own performance costumes, obejcts, or puppets, and also their research on the traditions of exhibition in Western museological practice.

**Reading a Painting, 2024** - In the short film Reading a Painting, artist Meg Huston reads a painting she made in 1990 as a response to the Gulf War, which she witnessed through news coverage from her home in the United States. The single-shot work unfolds Huston's hesitations about the purpose of making art in a time of war, and the implications on the citizens of countries who wage wars, but rarely experience them on their own soils. Meg Huston is the artist's mother, who she collaborate with sometimes.

**Ok what I was told was, 2024** - Ok what I was told was is a text-based work in four panels. The text, hand-stamped with custom letter stamps on an offset monoprint that continues to change as the panels progress, begins with the story from Igor Stravinski's Le Sacre Du Printemps, and proceeds to rewrite it. The new version is a revision that questions the original expendability of a gendered body, and refocuses on shared care and attention to collective surroundings in a speculative world that sits outside systems of exploitation, extraction, and consumption. The letter stamps are based on letters from storefronts and signs of independent businesses (both shuttered and still open) in some of Toronto's west end neighborhoods, which are rapidly being redeveloped. They were turned ino the digital typeface RONO, which is free to download from the artist's website.

**Let Me Tell You About This $hoe, 2023** - Taking the form of a day-hired Health & Safety instructor, the performance Let Me Tell You About This $hoe positions the presentation of artistic research and work as gift-giving, using humour as a vehicle to recall, reiterate, and propose modes of artistic, learning, and citation practices that challenge the illusion of an untethered individual, enforced by neoliberal mantras for independent labour and success with an origin in colonial exploitation and societal oppression. (Performed during a program organized by Pumice Raft in Toronto, Canada).

**Forever Fever, 2021** - An exhibition at Peach (Rotterdam) of large-scale multiple exposure silver gelatin prints made in residence at Peach Black, the black and white darkroom at Peach gallery in Rotterdam. The works combine images from my personal archive, combining photographs I made but never printed when I first learned to use an analog camera in my early teens. On April 17, 2021, I was live on Rotterdam-based community radio Worm Radio with Available & The Rat speaking about the residency at Peach Black, and playing some music I was listening to when I shot these images.

**A Room with Four People, public billboard project, 2021** - In A room with four people (2021), Lili Huston-Herterich presents a series of photographs on four billboards along Ryding Avenue and Runnymede Road, which are located near Pumice Raft in Toronto, Canada. Drawing on methods of character and narrative development through the arrangement of found clothing as bodily forms, each billboard represents one of four characters, each with their name and characteristics presented in text alongside their image. The typefaces used mimic the signs of local businesses in the surrounding area to echo their shared history of textile manufacturing. In the gallery, Huston-Heterich’s manuscript of a play starring these four characters explores cycles of use, labour, and refuse.

**Real 'til I come, 2021** - In close proximity to her home in Rotterdam, Lili Huston-Herterich has sourced fibres from the detritus of the textile industry as the foundation for sculptures that are knotted or felted, thus marking the passage through multiple generations of hands. Real 'til I come is an installation that includes glass sculptures from 2018 and newly made for the exhibition with waste glass from the gallery staff's household garbage, produced during public workshops held at Badischer Kunstverein the weekend preceding the opening of the exhibition.

**Glass Workshops at Badischer Kunstverein, 2021** - These workshops led groups through the process of using waste glass vessels to produce new vessels with a manual process of breaking glass with heat, and reassembly with various types of adhesives. The materials from the workshops were collected from Badischer Kunstverein's staff over the three months preceding the exhibition, and consisted primarily of their household glass garbage. The emptied containers that fuel the staff of the institution were then repurposed to produce new sculptural works made by workshop participants, and the material remains of the workshops were used to produce new sculptural works for the exhibition With a view to a later date, or never at the gallery.

**System of Radical Dependency** - System of Radical Dependency traces the lineages, from concept to production to completion, of my existing artistic works. It is a project that that acknowledges the dependencies in my artist practice, which include not only the institutions and people that have hosted and enabled my work’s display, but the people who surrounded me in the process of the conceptual development of it. With this research project, there is an opportunity to redefine how the traces of an artistic practice – through the various support systems that facilitate research, experimentation, and manifestation – can be represented through online distribution. System of Radical Dependency preserves an alternate portrait of how artistic work is not made alone, but rather through the plurality of subjects and experiences.

**A Manual for Saving Head** - A solo exhibition of photographic prints and textile sculptures at Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto. An excerpt from the exhibition text, written in collaboration with Ruth Skinner: "Yesterday I was rolling the words Manual for Braiding Bread in my head, Manual for Braiding Bread in my mouth - Manual for Braiding Bread, Manual for Braiding Head, Manual for Saving Head. Saving head. Like a meditation: save your head. A transformative slip of/ into focus. Save your head from the excesses it has received and not yet had a chance to catch up with. Summon the middle space of sleep to conjure a bodily jolt. A transformation of states: sleep to waking. In making anything, there is always something left over. Things have nowhere to go so they stick around, just move places, perhaps change elemental states."

**Bedroom Singing** - A stream-of-consciousness "talk" performance delivered laying down with closed eyes about the sounds, songs and people that frequented a teenage bedroom, punctuated by moments of singing to music from headphones. This performance was hosed and organised by Antenna Rotterdam, a venue in a carpeted bedroom in an apartment in Rotterdam.

**You May Bargain! I Know You May.** - An installation of textile sculpture and installation, text work, and new and archival video works both made in collaboration with burlesque dancer Aria Delanoche. From an interview about the work: ‘I get tied up following some threads. Instead of thinking through, I follow sideways, from multiple directions at once. I spend a lot of time untangling knots in the studio. Threaded material gets moved around and every time it relocates, knots form. Some kind of memory of a change, a trace of an encounter, showing a complexity of being within a world. Unknotting these knots could be the performance of re- collecting when, or where, or how they occurred, inevitably involving speculation or mediation. It takes some time to get through certain knots.'

**Attention Wallet** - Attention Wallet is made in close collaboration with Aria Delanoche, a professional burlesque dancer and the artist's sister. Together, they introduce a work of collaged materials, video, and sound from a wide net of sources: an accumulative sculptural practice, a dance practice, characters made from antique markets, a depression-era Christmas card, a conversation with a working mother, and sound from their own video play as children. Combining cross-generational conversations on work, labor, time and practice between three women in a family, Attention Wallet asks what is exactly to be done with rehearsal, repetition, and ongoing play in an economy of attention.

**The Whole Roach** - The Whole Roach is a video work made during the early stages of research on the textile industry in the Netherlands, and subsequent thoughts on capitalist and colonial globalization and the labor systems it relies on. The voice in the video reads a poem made from an auto-translated didactic panel at the TextielMuseum in Tilburg while swimming in port of Rotterdam, interrupted by associative content.

**A two-top set for one (with a fragmented view)** - A two-top set for one (with a fragmented view) recreates the form of a long wooden screen that stood in the mess hall of CMA CGM Fidelio, a freight ship that I crossed the Pacific Ocean on in 2017. The screen partitioned dining from leisure spaces. Underscoring the rigid hierarchies aboard the vessel, the screen in practice also tended to separate areas habituated by the Filipino crew from those of the French officers. The reproduced screen is relieved of its rigidity, as it is rendered from found fabric: specifically cotton T-shirts- turned-grease rags used to lubricate the ship’s massive engine room workings. Rips and stains become registers of labour, movement, and contact. These textiles however, betray themselves as indices of global capitalism: produced as fast fashion by underpaid workers in Asian garment factories, they are shipped aboard container vessels to distributors around the world, only to return to the ships as deadstock, picked over by seamen and cut into rags to then play a second role in the maintenance of the same system.

**Shanties** - Shanties is a visual and auditory landscape that considers the contemporary role of music at sea. Verbal moments punctuate a soundscape of songs, and conversations about them, recorded aboard CMA CGM Fidelio, a freight ship travelling from Vancouver to Shanghai across the Pacific Ocean.

You Breathe Differently Under the Weight. Debt and Credit

Datum: 06-06-2025 t/m 07-09-2025

Locatie: Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (GAK)

The images and entanglements that the artists address in the group exhibition You Breathe Differently Under the Weight. Debt and Credit are part of an indebted existence in which the abstract operations of debt are reflected in relationships. They address the traces of human agency without, however, representing it concretely; they are inscribed in landscapes, in queer readings of (historical) narratives, as well as in their scales and measurabilities.

Cutting the Puppeteer's Strings

Datum: 20-10-2024 t/m 01-06-2025

Locatie: Sammlung Philara

Cutting The Puppeteer's strings was an extensive group exhibition spanning across 1.700sqm of Sammlung Philara in Düsseldorf focusing on marionettes and marionette theatre, shadow plays and puppetry, and associated aspects of staging, display and characters in contemporary art - where the traditional craft of puppet theater is currently receiving special attention.

https://www.philara.de/en/exhibitions/2024-08/group-show

Artist Residency: Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten

Datum: 01-09-2023 t/m 31-08-2025

Locatie: Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten

Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten is a two-year artistic research and production residency in Amsterdam for international artists. I spent the two years at the Rijksakademie deepening my research in new value systems rooted in trust and attention, and produced large bodies of work while in residence that include video, performance, sculpture, electronic works, and installation.

Keeping Time with the Unrest (solo exhibition)

Datum: 17-06-2023 t/m 15-07-2023

Locatie: Zalucky Contemporary

A room with four people

Datum: 01-04-2021 t/m 31-05-2021

Locatie: Pumice Raft

In samenwerking met: Contact Photography Festival

A Dog Named Sit (two-person exhibition)

Datum: 07-02-2021 t/m 14-03-2021

Locatie: Apparatus Projects

Two-person exhibition with Max Guy at Apparatus Projects in Chicago. An in-progress video work made with puppets will be exhibited, exploring notions of improvisation and collective story (re) telling, a thematic focus shared with Guy's current work.

https://www.apparatusprojects.com

A System of Radical Dependency

Datum: 01-07-2020 t/m 01-10-2020

In samenwerking met: Index Foundation (Stockholm), CBK Rotterdam

A research project (essay and website) tracing the lineages, from concept to production to completion, of my existing artistic works. Specifically, I am interested in building a “system of radical dependency” that takes my existing work as a starting point, tracing retroactively the origins of the materials used, the mentors and resources the processes were informed by, and the people and institutions that supported their public distribution.

A Manual for Saving Head

Datum: 23-11-2019 t/m 25-01-2020

Locatie: Zalucky Contemporary

Solo exhibition of photographic work, drawing, and textile sculpture.

http://lilihustonherterich.com/projects/2019/2019-manualforsavinghead

Bedroom Singing

Datum: 10-09-2019 t/m 10-09-2019

Locatie: Antenne Rotterdam

A stream-of-consciousness "talk" performance delivered laying down with closed eyes about the sounds, songs and people that frequented a teenage bedroom, punctuated by moments of singing to music from headphones. Antenna is a venue in a carpeted bedroom in an apartment in Rotterdam.

http://lilihustonherterich.com/projects/2019/2019-bedroomsinging

I went to your concert and I didn't feel anything (v2.0)

Datum: 22-08-2019

Locatie: Focal Point

In samenwerking met: Locatie Z (Den Haag), Focal Point (UK)

'I WENT TO YOUR CONCERT AND I DIDN'T FEEL ANYTHING' is a performance lecture about emo music from the early 2000s, told through the artists' personal history. It speaks of the eponymous emotional performativity of this white male dominated music genre with humor through bad teen drag and a final riotgrrl reclamation of voice and emotional indifference (with backup vocals from Daphne Simons).

http://lilihustonherterich.com/projects/2019/2019-iwenttoyourconcert

You May Bargain! I Know You May.

Datum: 11-07-2019 t/m 15-07-2019

Locatie: Het Nieuwe Instituut

An installation of textile sculpture and installation, text work, and new and archival video works both made in collaboration with burlesque dancer Aria Delanoche.

http://lilihustonherterich.com/projects/2019/2019-youmaybargain

Outdoor School

Datum: 01-07-2018 t/m 31-08-2018

Locatie: Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

Outdoor School was a five-week residency program with Amish Morrell, Diane Borsato, and Tania Willard. There, I produced a series of analog color photographic works and texts alongside collaborator Tor Jonsson, as well as a workshop and performance event called "Keeping Loose Ends".

http://lilihustonherterich.com/projects/2018/2018-banff.php

Sonic Eggs

Datum: 17-03-2018

Locatie: Wolfarts

Collaborative performance and sound-piece with Rotterdam-based artist Merve Kılıçer, after spending a week in-residence with art space Swimming Pool in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Available and The Rat

Datum: 01-02-2018 t/m 01-01-2022

A project space run out of the front of my apartment in the south of Rotterdam. Available and The Rat hosts artistic projects, workshops, exhibitions, and events.

availableandtherat.com

23 Days At Sea

Datum: 01-06-2017 t/m 27-03-2017

Locatie: Freight Ship CMA CGM Fidelio

A residency on a freight ship crossing the Pacific Ocean. One work produced, "Shanties", is a visual and auditory landscape that considers the contemporary role of music at sea. Verbal moments punctuate a soundscape of songs, and conversations about them, recorded aboard CMA CGM Fidelio, a freight ship traveling from Vancouver to Shanghai across the Pacific Ocean.

http://lilihustonherterich.com/projects/2018/2018-shanties.php

We of the Middling Sort

Datum: 25-02-2017 t/m 25-03-2017

Locatie: Zalucky Contemporary

For We of the Middling Sort, the cutaways of a local upholsterer and the unwanted clothing donated by its residents have been used as the raw material for the work. Some of these garments, stretched taut or disassembled, are documented in photograms-cameraless images made by exposing a photosensitive surface to light. The prints capture light passing through garment openings and gossamer-thin surfaces, revealing spectral portraits of wear and the murky threshold between flesh and fabric.

http://lilihustonherterich.com/projects/2017/2017-zalucky

Fogo Island Arts Workshops

Datum: 01-06-2016 t/m 15-09-2016

In samenwerking met: Fogo Island Arts

Workshops on Fogo Island in Newfoundland in the summers of 2015 and 2016. Attendees of these workshops (adults and children, tourists and locals) were invited to think of the atmosphere of Fogo Island - specifically, the ground and the sky, as integral ingredients in producing these process-based artworks. Fogo Island's sun will expose cyanotype prints, while Shoal Bay's rocky terrain will serve as ample ground for the diverse textures for frottage rubbings.

http://lilihustonherterich.com/FogoIsland

The Mouth Holds the Tongue

Datum: 20-06-2015 t/m 07-09-2015

Locatie: The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery

Collaborative exhibition with artists Nadia Belerique and Laurie Kang. The work foregrounds the pleasures inherent in representing and experiencing time and space. It points towards collaborative methodologies by privileging temporal fissures and offering temporality as a visceral means of organizing individuals non-hierarchically. The forms of collaboration implicit in this project are not found simply within the artists' collectivity but implicate the curator, institution, viewer, and space.

http://lilihustonherterich.com/projects/2015/2015-thepowerplant

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