Liz Cohen BODYWORK

Separate exhibition
Main hall, Färgfabriken

An exhibition about the body, identity and reconstructions.

Liz Cohen’s work BODYWORK is about identity creation and group belonging. On site in Färgfabriken’s large exhibition hall, Liz Cohen converts a Trabant, a small East German car, into a Chevy El Camino lowrider, a kind of Mexican-American raggar car. At the same time, she transforms herself into the bikini model that will sit on the hood when her self-built car will be shown at motor shows around the world.

A lot of activities are going on around Liz’s car workshop. She is rebuilding Färgfabriken into a car workshop and a gym. Not as passive installations, but for real. For more than a year, she has worked at a “car body shop” in Arizona, USA, without any previous knowledge of cars but a burning interest in that culture. She has learned welding and mechanics to rebuild an old East German Trabant into a custom made American Chevrolet El Camino. German functionalism will become an American lowrider.

And the artist plays all the roles at once: she owns the car, decorates it and sits on its hood like a bikini girl. Liz Cohen is no joke. Liz Cohen is a workshop. Liz Cohen is not passively “interested” in the car world or body-obsessed gyms. She doesn’t try to understand from a distance. She does not describe anything from the page. She puts herself right into new contexts, fully. She doesn’t talk about meddling guys or bikini chicks on bonnets, either as phenomena or problems – she tests for herself what it’s all about. In the exhibition, Liz Cohen takes the double meaning of the word “body”, body and body, to its ultimate consequence.