Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance, ICA - review
Before film became ubiquitous in galleries, Lis Rhodes was among its early champions as an artistic medium. Her films regularly crop up in surveys of influential film but the ICA's exhibition is her highest profile solo show to date. It condenses her career into seven films, shown across three rooms, from Dresden Dynamo (1972) to a work completed last year.
At the work's core is an experimental approach to the stuff of film and a fiercely political outlook. Dresden Dynamo is an abstract assault on the senses. Eschewing a camera, Rhodes affixed patterned Letratone stickers to the film itself and used filters to create red and blue colours.
Stripes, dots and wavy lines surge across the screen, and their forms dictate the accompanying barrage of white noise and atonal bleeps.
More sedately paced but no less radical in approach is Light Reading (1978), a constantly shifting filmic collage of photographs, film strip and text. Rhodes's almost riddlish narration splices together descriptions of the film making process with traces of an ungraspable narrative, hinted at in a photograph of a bloodstained bed to which the film returns, and ominously.
While that dense voiceover contains hints of feminist politics, Rhodes is far more direct in a two-screen installation which brings together Cold Draft (1988) and two films partly shot amid recent protests in London.
The narration to the largely abstract Cold Draft is a poetic critique of Eighties economics, which gains a new potency through being shown alongside Rhodes's video-camera shots from within police kettles as protests raged against the causes and effects of the economic crisis. She also tells the story of a flour mill in Gaza bombed by the Israeli military.
Over the years, Rhodes has shifted from abstraction to near-documentary as her anger at governments becomes palpable. Her work is all the more compelling because her eloquence with film matches her political convictions.
Until March 25 (020 7930 3647, ica.org.uk)
Lis Rhodes: Dissonance and Disturbance
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall
SW1Y 5AH
