Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 5

Born 1983 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Lives in Germany

Ligia Lewis filmed A Plot, A Scandal in the historic quarters of Rimini, Italy, a site the artist sees as upholding “Eurocentric ideals of (white) Man’s dominion over the land.” One recurring aspect of the landscape, the towering cypress trees in ordered rows, stands as an example. The film opens with the sonic resonance of the church bell portrayed later as a towering monument, pointing to the Christian ideals that served as both a precursor to the Enlightenment and bedfellow in maintaining this hierarchical order. Weaving together multiple historical epics with political and mythical narratives, the work uses ideas of spectacle and scandal to address the continued dispossession of “Europe’s Others,” as Lewis describes them.

“Utopian or mundane, how might scandal reveal what lies unwittingly close to our fantasies? Is it the demand for repair? Or the otherwise brutish desire for revenge?” Lewis explores these questions through the stories of philosopher and slave trade beneficiary John Locke, who coined the relationship between “life, liberty, and property”; the Cuban artist and revolutionary José Antonio Aponte; and her own great-grandmother Lolón Zapata.