Multimedia artist Lynn Hershman Leeson is known for her use of video, performance, and the creation of avatars to interrogate issues of gender, surveillance, and the representation of the feminine. At the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, she presents her groundbreaking life project The Electronic Diaries (1984–2025), in which she unflinchingly exposes her own life against the backdrop of contemporary technological developments, repeatedly questioning how these advances shape humanity, ways of living together, and how people relate to one another. The chapters developed between 1984 and 2019 are complemented here, for the first time, by her most recent one: About Time (2025). Recording intimate confessions over decades and addressing events of trauma and personal transformation, in The Electronic Diaries the artist sees the camera as a mirror to confide in, creating a space for narrative experimentation that anticipates contemporary discussions about self-image and the digitalization of subjectivity. By continuously recording herself, Leeson not only documents her personal history but also anticipates debates about the performativity of identity in the age of social networks, hyperconnectivity, and digital manipulation. The Electronic Diaries bear witness to a time when the boundary between the so-called ‘real’ and the fabricated is dissolving into screens and algorithms, in which identity no longer seems to be a fixed destination, but a file that is constantly being edited. Thus, Leeson’s work is inscribed in the very mutable skin of our era, where to exist is to rewrite oneself, time and again, in the volatile memory of machines, all the while finding ways to escape an increasingly policed and vigilant digital fabric.

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION:

The Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman Leeson (1984–2025), video, colour, sound; Screen 1: Confessions of a Chameleon (1984), 8′ 46″ , Binge (1987), 9′ 09″ , First Person Plural (1988), 14′ 16″ , Shadow’s Song (1990), 7 17＂; Screen 2: Cyber Baby (2019), 15′  40″ , +22 (2019), 20′ 13″ ; Screen 3: About Time (2025), 5′ 17″ . Courtesy of Bridget Donahue and Wouters Gallery. Commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal