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Lena Aliper
website © Colin Coutts 2010
Lena Aliper
Twenty Days of Being Silent
Lena Aliper’s essentially unautobiographic series of self-portraits, shot in the course of 20 days during which she abstained from speaking, balances between documentary photography and performance. Originally conceived as a somewhat formal exercise in style, the images ended up recording a self-subversive experiment with a lost sense of identity. The body, deprived of other ways of communication than making itself visible, over-reliant on gesture and expression and permanently aware of its forced muteness, becomes the scene for an experience that is at the same time mental and organic. The staged, thoroughly constructed look of the final photographs becomes an anti-statement, in a rather Brechtian "here-I-stand-no-implications-made" manner.
Of Russian and German blood, Lena Aliper was born in Moscow. She studied the influence of cinema and visual culture on 20th century fiction and earned an MA in literature from Moscow State University and Université Paris VIII Saint-Denis in 2008 before fully switching into photography and obtaining a Graduate Diploma in Photography Practice from LCC in 2009.
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