Ligia Lewis: I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…

“I’m delighted to open our autumn programme with Ligia Lewis, who is one of the most interesting voices at the intersection of performance, dance and visual art, and who has been living and working in Germany for more than a decade. Building on our practice of presenting established artists such as Diane Arbus alongside experimental contemporary positions, we hope to bring together diverse audiences and to enliven the dialogue between historical and contemporary art.”  
— Jenny Schlenzka, Director of Gropius Bau 

In Ligia Lewis’ performances and films, comedy and tragedy collide. As an artist and choreographer, she playfully weaves together narratives of race, gender, violence and resistance to unravel how these histories continue to haunt and define the present. The notion of being seen and witnessed – or not – is central to Lewis’ practice. For her, choreography is the movement of ideas across bodies. She describes this as a political act; a writing against racist misrepresentations and erasure.   

“Dressing each dance with a considered music score and within a visual design allows me to work through physical narration to build a dynamic dramaturgy that releases itself from the fetish of the body and the fetish of movement invention. I’m always after some­thing specific in my work, even while experimenting.”
— Ligia Lewis 

Collapsing historical timelines, Lewis’ works emphasise the recurring cycles of racialised violence. Her films and performances suggest that history is carried within the body, underlining themes such as interdependence, disorder and play. Using voice, text and charged facial expressions, Lewis creates multi-layered works that challenge how we see each other. In addition to her embodied practice, a rich theoretical and political curiosity forms the basis of Lewis’ thinking. She understands the concept of “study” as a reflective practice grounded in action, in dialogue with a chorus of voices.   

The newly conceived work Wayward Chant (2025) explores the intersections of sound and movement as figures appear and disappear within a fleeting choreography. Lewis playfully uses the architecture of the atrium of Gropius Bau to cast shadows. By drawing attention to what remains in the shadows, she offers a countermovement to more familiar modes of representation. Several times a week, the work is activated through live performance: the choreography of moving, chanting bodies resembles a hummed hymn, performed in delay. Over the course of the exhibition, Wayward Chant unfolds, iteratively and seemingly in passing, accumulating into an evening-length performance on 28 and 29 November.  

In A Plot, A Scandal (2023), a series of disparate plots is woven together as a form of resistance and embodied memory. The film departs from 17th-century philosopher John Locke’s doctrine on (white) man’s natural rights to life, liberty and property, which later informed the U.S. Declaration of Independence. As of late, it is understood that Locke personally benefited from the trade of enslaved people through his investments in the Royal African Company. As a response, Lewis turns to a series of plots enacted across the Caribbean that act as forms of resistance.  

Water Will (in Melody) (2018/2025) departs from the Brothers Grimm’s 19th-century tale The Willful Child, which tells the story of a stubborn child whose disobedience leads to their death and eventual haunting. Building on feminist theorist and scholar Sara Ahmed’s thoughts, Lewis points to how agency is set askew by racialisation, rendering “wilfulness” illegible, particularly for Black femmes. The exhibition room is set with a score of voices unleashed in their wilfulness that create a sonic landscape of horror. Speech breaks down, stumbles, gurgles and gets swallowed, mixed with a chopped and remixed version of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead.  

The live installation study now steady (2023) turns the exhibition space into a studio for ongoing choreographic study. From Thursday to Sunday, a group of dancers perform scores by Lewis as a durational process. These scores have shaped many of Lewis’ stage and film works. study now steady renders visible threads of Lewis’ process-centred artistic practice and emphasises the notion that life is a state of constant rehearsal. In a shared space with the audience, the studies unfold through the interplay of bodies and the surrounding architecture. 

The video deader than dead (2020) is based on an investigation into performative modes such as “deadpan” and “corpsing” and reflects on Blackness as a political position and anti-Blackness as a structural condition. In the film, the performers repeatedly lay flat or “dead”, resisting any narrative development. Their encounters shift between gestures of care and violence. They crash to the ground, their bodies carried and eventually pulled from centre stage. Inspired by philosopher David Marriott’s 2016 essay Corpsing; Or The Matter of Black Life, Lewis’ deader than dead reflects on time, the inevitability of death and tragedy’s disproportionate proximity to Black people as a result of racism. 

As part of I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR…, Lewis and the exhibition’s curator Nora-Swantje Almes have compiled a selection of books in collaboration with curators and writers Julia Grosse and Magnus Elias Rosengarten. Floating across the exhibition spaces, these texts invite visitors to engage even more with some of the ideas that ground Lewis’ work. 

Ligia Lewis: I’M NOT HERE FORRRRR… is curated by Nora-Swantje Almes, Curator Live Programme and Outreach, with Alexandra Philippovskaya, Assistant Curator Live Programme and Outreach.  
Exhibition Management: Nora Bergbreiter and Elisabeth Pannrucker, Project Assistants 

About Ligia Lewis 

Based in Berlin since 2013, Ligia Lewis has developed a multifaceted choreographic practice that spans performance, live installation and film. She works as an artist, choreographer and director presenting her work internationally on stage, in galleries or museums. In autumn 2023 she opened her first solo exhibition study now steady at the Center for Arts, Research and Alliances in NYC. A survey of her stage works was presented at HAU Hebbel am Ufer entitled Complaint, A Lyric in the same year. She was a participating artist in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. In 2025, she worked together with Cullberg – one of Sweden’s most renowned international dance companies. They premiered Some Thing Folk at the prestigious festival Tanz im August in Berlin. 

Lewis is the recipient of numerous awards, including the German theatre prize DER FAUST (2023) for A Plot, A Scandal; the Tabori Award (2021); a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant (2018) and a Bessie Award (2017). 

With her expansive interdisciplinary practice, Ligia Lewis is a central figure in redefining performance within the context of the visual arts and is Artist in Focus of the Berliner Festspiele in 2025.