Lili Reynaud-Dewar
°1975, La Rochelle, France
Works and lives in Paris.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar is an artist and writer whose practice embraces performance, video, sculpture, installation, and text. Trained in public law and ballet before turning to art, she has developed a layered repertoire that explores themes of identity, race, gender, and the body. Drawing from histories of subcultures, liberation movements, literature, theory, music, and cinema, Reynaud-Dewar weaves together autobiographical material and cultural inquiry to trace connections between private experience and collective history.
She often turns to radical, transgressive figures – such as Josephine Baker, Guillaume Dustan, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sun Ra, Donna Haraway, Arthur Rimbaud, Eileen Myles, and Cosi Fanni Tutti – revisiting their textual and aesthetic legacies to probe how sexuality, race, and emancipation are inscribed within (or excluded from) culture and how they shape personal mythologies. Lili Reynaud-Dewar is known for using her own body as both subject and material: a key series of ongoing video works begun in 2011 involves Reynaud-Dewar dancing naked, covered in body paint, in the various cultural institutions that host her, addressing the alienation felt by individuals in spaces of power, and blurring the boundary between personal and private spheres.
She frequently works collaboratively with friends, students, or family members, approaching art-making as a social experiment, a terrain for research, and an opportunity to amplify radical voices. Her choreographed environments, films, texts, and sculptures become an aesthetic and tangible manifestation of urgent social and political issues, moving viewers to reconsider the systems and norms that structure collective life.
