Mari Mahr: Lili Brik

About

The series focuses on the Russian artist and author Lili Brik (née Lilya Yuryevna Kagan, 1891-1978) who was part of the literary and artistic avant-garde in Russia from 1914, and to whom the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky dedicated many of his works.

Mahr’s images are constructed using a method she often used, whereby earlier printed photographs of particular places serve as backdrops in her studio, in front of which she assembles related objects. These arrangements are then rephotographed and printed, resulting in compositions that disrupt the viewer’s sense of scale and perspective. Whereas the background photographs used in these series were often taken on location, and are closer to documentary photography in their style, the objects in the foreground were taken from her domestic environments at the time. As her friend, the filmmaker Nigel Finch has described, Mahr was ‘fabricating a world from glimpsed events, snippets of overheard conversation, and borrowed objects.’

The faces that feature in the Lili Brik images are those of Mahr’s mother and grandmother. It was certain old photographs of her grandmother who lived in Paris in the interwar years which reminded Mahr of Lili Brik especially. Family, and matrilineal correspondence are important themes in this sequence of works, as is the assemblage nature of memory.