Liane Lang is an artist based in London. Born in Germany she studied at NCAD in Dublin and completed a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College followed by a Postgraduate Diploma at the Royal Academy, where she graduated in 2006. Her work is concerned with notions of animacy, which she investigates through sculpture, photography and video works. Many of Lang’s works examine museum objects and the biographies they attempt to narrate, modes of display and the verisimilitude of art objects, particularly figurative sculptures and political monuments. Recent projects have included residencies in Hungary and Latvia, where the artist used photography and animation to stage interventions with monuments from the Socialist era. She has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad and her work is held in a number of notable collections.

Education

2003-2006 Royal Academy Schools, Postgraduate
1995-1998 Goldsmiths’ College, London, BA Hons. Fine Art
1995 National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Foundation Course

Solo Shows

Upcoming: WW Gallery, House Guests, 2011
2011 The Long Way Home, Permanent Public Commission for Croydon Council
2010 Monumental Misconceptions, KvH Projects, London
2010 Shadows and Stowaways with Squid/Tabernacle, Dalston, London
2010 Mesmeric Monument at Supernova Gallery, Riga
Talks accompanying the exhibition at KIM Institute
supported by the British Council, catalogue
2009 Public Commission, Portobello Road, RBKC
2008 Artist at Apsley, Flora Fairbairn Projects
2007 Fondling Germanicus, Kunstverein Heidelberg
2006 Verisimilitude, T1+2 Artspace, London
2001 Offspace, Vienna, new video work, Austria
2001 Southfirst Art, new video work, New York

Selected Group Shows

Art First, London, new photography, 2-person show, October 2011
Once Upon A Time in The West, Cultural Olympiad, July 2012
2011 Afternoon Tea, WW Gallery at the 54th Venice Biennale
2011 The Sexual Object, Salon-Vert, Regents Park
2011 London Art Fair, WW Gallery
2011 68m Gallery, Copenhagen
2010 Heft, Winchester Discovery Centre, curated by Tony Hayward
2010 Flaming July, Leighton House Museum
2010 Strangeness and Charm, Fieldgate Gallery at The Last Tuesday Society
2009 Is there anybody there? WilsonWilliams Gallery, London
2009 The Apartment, curated by Paul Buck
2009 Merriscourt, curated by Flora Fairbairn
2008 Super Cilia, Royal Liver Building, Liverpool
2008 Lucifers Greatest War, FRED Gallery, Leibzig
2008 Gothic, Fieldgate Gallery, London
2007 Zoo Art Fair 05/06/07, Royal Academy of Art, T1+2 Art Space
2007 Anticipation, One One One Gallery, Flora Fairbairn Projects
2007 ArtFutures, Bloomberg Space, London
2005 Go-Between, Kunstverein Bregenz, Austria
2005 Sesiones Animadas, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
2004 Mementoes and Other Curiosities, London
2003 Kunstwerke, Berlin, Animations
2002 Liverpool Biennial, PoT
2001 Animations, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York
2001 New Labour, Saatchi Gallery, London

Work in Collections

Deutsche Bank Collection
Royal Academy Collection
White Cube Gallery
Ernst & Young Collection
Arts Council Of England Collection
Saatchi Collection
DEM Collection
Collection Kunstverein Bregenz
numerous private collections

Liane Lang’s photographic series, Rooms, seems to call for detective work. Rather like in a crime novel, we are given a series of clues and are invited to piece the rest together. Disembodied hands beckon from doorways, sinister reflections appear in mirrors, corpse-like bodies are splayed across sofas and lovers hold secret trysts. But these aren’t clues that will lead us anywhere — they are a series of red herrings cunningly designed to set us off on the wrong track. Embedded in the manifest content of the photographs lies another series of traces, leading us to confront the real mystery: the question of what on earth these images are actually trying to show us.

Time is an important feature in all detective work. Where were you at midnight on the 25th June? How long does it take to get from the Strand to Pentonville Prison in a taxi? Where do the clock’s hands point in the snapshot? When did you first meet the deceased? And time is also a key feature of Lang’s pictures. A photograph is often thought to represent a split second — unlike a painting, which might take hours, weeks or years. But these photographs are more leisurely — far from grasping at a passing instant, they absorb the information slowly. Shot in a real hotel, during working hours and using found light, these images could be said to contain more than they explicitly show. In some, the shutter has been left open for as long as twenty-five minutes. So what might appear to be an empty corridor may in fact be a busy thoroughfare. As the camera has been patiently soaking up the light — through the tiniest of apertures — the hotel’s inhabitants have been passing through the space, leaving no trace on the negative. This ‘slowness’ is visible in the image in the burning whiteness of the lamplight, the haziness of the shadows, the iridescence along the leaf-edges of the flower arrangements and the incredible detail and depth of field. As in the earliest photographs of Nicéphore Niépce from the 1820s, the length of the exposure means that the natural light inevitably shifts, giving the image a strange, artificial look. It is in this pictorial oddness that one can literally see time passing.

In spite of all this, Lang’s pictures exude the quality of something glimpsed or captured off-guard. This is perhaps due to the way the figures appear — either via reflections, or partially, as if they are hiding. And here the plot thickens. In the daguerrotypes of the mid-nineteenth century, the sitters had to remain perfectly still for the few seconds it took to expose the image — which, of course, often resulted in a blurry, imprecise portrait. Lang’s figures have held their awkward poses for almost half an hour without a tremor. Every hair on their heads is perfectly defined. And this can only be, we deduce, because they aren’t alive. If we look at them closer we notice peculiarities in their skin colour —the sort of discolouration you might see at a morgue. Or perhaps a downmarket wax museum. There are casting joins here and there, and shamelessly synthetic wigs. These aren’t people at all, nor corpses, but dolls. Or even bits of dolls, carefully arranged to trick us into imagining a human presence. The lovers’ arms in the armchairs are just that — arms and nothing else. The figure in the bed is simply a pair of legs with a carefully arranged ‘hairstyle’. And the hands grasping the statue, like the skeleton in the joke, have no body to go with.

If the photos initially suggest drama — stories unfolding, things happening — the more one looks, the more one is forced to see that there’s nothing going on at all. And perhaps this is their most unnerving feature. If the manifest content points to illicit sex, voyeurism, pain and loneliness — and the kinds of crime that accompany these human states — the latent content reveals a kind of nullity. Time passes and everything stays the same. The only thing that moves is the light.

At least in Nancy and Armour the figures have company. In the former she is watched over by a collection of portraits, and in the latter she is guarded by a couple of dark knights. But in the end this only seems to intensify the aura of morbidity. The juxtaposition of the paintings and the metal forms with the apparently flesh-and-blood bodies is disconcerting. It makes us confuse the real and the fake, the living and the dead. The paintings and the artefacts are clearly from another time, a reminder of something past, of people long gone; the glamour and charm of the hotel is entirely built on this idea of ‘history’, of something lost. Lang’s figures at least seem contemporary — to come from our world. But at the same time there’s nothing to them. They barely exist. The two sets of figures appear to be in different ontological registers, but are in fact exactly the same.

In Delusion Hotel only the inert and the inanimate have time to appear. The real guests are like ghosts, drifting though the space and vanishing. Their animacy is what makes them fail to register. Only the flowers seem to occupy the gap between the living and the dead. In the manner of a Dutch painting, their very aliveness is what points to mortality. They are an intrusion of flimsy organic matter — the only part of the image that will benefit from immortalisation on film.

And what about the viewers of these images? Are we like the phantasmal hotel guests, looking in and passing on? Or like readers of a fiction, whose fixed world we inhabit temporarily before going back to our own indeterminate existence? If Lang’s photographs can be compared to a detective novel, perhaps the body in the story is ours. If we follow the clues the mystery we are confronted with is that of our own impermanence.