Louisa Clement: Repräsentantinnen / Representative

Softcover | 17.4 x 2.24 x 24.23 cm | 332 pp

Verlag Kettler | 2021 | 9783862069064

Text in English and German

This artist's book incorporates a with a sound box that allows it to interact with its readers. The work blurs the distinction between original and copy, doll and clone, human and robot to explore various technical, psychological, economic, and ethical questions raised by it. 

Ever since her student years at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Louisa Clement (b. 1987) has investigated the transformation of human communication, especially in digital space and social media. One of her primary interests is the increasingly widespread display of idealised self-portraits. For her work Repräsentantinnen, Clement created copies of herself that are as fascinating as they are unsettling.

In collaboration with a Chinese company specialising in the manufacture of sex dolls, she commissioned life-sized manikins to be made based on parameters of her body that were calculated with the help of body scans, microphotographs, and video recordings of movements. With movable parts and sexually functional, these dolls not only have the same face as their creator, but are programmed to imitate the artist’s facial expressions and to communicate and interact with spectators and the surrounding world.