LIS RHODES

Born 1942
British artist and feminist filmmaker
Known for her density, concentration, and articulate sense of poetry in her visual works

Since the early 1970s, Rhodes has created radical and controversial art that challenges her viewers to question perspective of film through her work.

“reconsider film as a medium of communication and presentation of image, language and sound.” – Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance

Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance by Ann Jones (2012) – https://mostlyfilm.com/2012/01/30/lis-rhodes-dissonance-and-disturbance/

all the work here seems to include aspects of collated or layered visuals
The complexity of the image making and the disjunction between sound and image – they often happen at different times: there are both long silences and periods when the screen is blank – make the work a lot more engaging and enjoyable to watch than that sentence makes it sound
What makes these films interesting is that, despite a strong political message, Rhodes mixes the harsh narrative of protest against war and injustice with poetry and her eloquent brand of image-making, itself highly poetic; documentary footage is mixed with text and softly layered and fragmented images

Lis Rhodes: Dissident Lines – https://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/whats-on/lis-rhodes-dissident-lines/

She has described it as ‘visual abstraction’, ‘an attempt to make a material connection between what is seen and what is heard.’

Rhodes’ works since the 1990s have been responsive to unfolding geopolitical events. These films are potent and provocative critiques of a range of issues, from women’s rights, domestic violence to nuclear power, from migrant labour to surveillance (Orifso, 1999). More recently, In the Kettle (2012) cuts between the bombing of the Gaza Strip in 2009 to contemporaneous protests in London. Rather than comprising separate projects, Rhodes has seen these works as belonging to a single enquiry.