Video installations and performances
The pain and perhaps confusion that a girl feels during her first menstrual period is dwarfed by the social forces that kick in as soon as a girl becomes a woman and becomes fertile. The girls in 'What did I do wrong?' refuse to play a passive role in the play of power, honor and control. They refuse the social straitjacket that links their reproductive capacity to behavioral restriction and prudishness...
In 'Vastum', the artists' duo L.A. Raeven portray the fear of ageing and degeneration that pervades our society. The work shows a woman, actually still a girl of 11 years old, with progeria: a disorder that causes premature ageing. As far as we know, there are only 45 people worldwide who suffer from this hereditary disorder. With the help of Mao Lin Liao from Replica we gave this girl the movements from a laboratorium rat. The viewer watches the girl through a tiny hole of a giant box and can hear and feel her banging against the walls of the box where she is captured in. (there is a sound and banging machine in the box)...
The Raeven twin sisters have become known for their penetrating and personal work on social themes such as the far-reaching individualization and the oppressive pursuit of perfection. The ‘cloned’ triplet sister Annelies also addresses these developments and focuses on the feeling of loneliness that often stems from this...
In Wild Zone 3 L.A. Raeven styled the appearances and choreographed the movements of a group of children. The similarities in how they look creates the impression that they are members of an androgynous sect: they are extremely tall, wear the same clothes, and it is unclear whether they are boys or girls...
The Milgram experiment is a famous psychological study exploring the willingness of individuals to follow the orders of authorities when those orders conflict with the individual's own moral judgment...
This is a symbiosis that normally has a positive charge, but in 'Mindless Living II' this symbiosis goes too far. Through birth, the mother is no longer inextricably linked to her child, but for the first time becomes outside of him. The symbiotic relationship changes and in the development of the individual, birth is a critical time for development later in life. 'Mindless Living II' is an installation consisting of a uterine cradle in which the baby falls into a light trance brought to influence him to want to remain in symbiosis with his mother...
Raven is a theater production in collaboration with Alexandra Broeder in which seven girls show what can happen if you don’t conform to the ideal image society asks from you. Being different becomes the new standard and they throw their bodies into battle. The performance has a touch of horror where the association of the black bird, as an evil bird who revenges itself, an important theme is...
Liesbeth and Angelique lived for years in a symbiosis with each other, as twins they form each other's mirror image. they did everything together and in the same way: live, eat, live and work. But in the symbiose lurks a potential conflict. The symbiose conflicts with the desire to be one's own person. because it is precisely in the difference with the other that your own identity arises...
This is not me is a selfportret. The dummies we see nowadays in shops represent usually the ideal body which is in fashion. We have seen the body of the dummy change in the past decades from a very feminine look to a more muscular look. You can see this back in society where not just a thin body, but a more trained body is ideal. In all the work of L.A. Raeven, they try to set themselves as the new ideal...
A Dream is the visualization of a recurring dream Angelique had after having fractured her hip.
We see an anxious and confused woman in shorts and a shirt on crutches, Angelique following another woman, sharply dressed and stoically striding through a building, down the hall, uo the stairs, non-responsive to the shouting of her name: “Liesbeth…! Liesbeth…!”...
This single-channel video is commissioned by Art Aid Foundation in Barcelona.
‘Dead Man Walking’ presents us with a person whose physical appearance has undergone a radical change... they explore feelings of hatred, despair and impotence in the face of the effects of antiretroviral treatment on the body... “Dead Man Walking” looks at the dysfunction between appearance and identity in a society that places extreme importance on physical beauty, and at the difficulty of accepting an image that does not match what we feel, but that is the image of our own body and therefore impossible to escape...
The installation 5200 ml (2005) shows empty cartons of juice, low-fat yogurt and Diet Coke, next to a single mattress with a crumpled sheet and a broken saucer full of cigarette butts. A girl is projected on the wall, drinking water and wine and eating low-fat yogurt in a short time. A total of 5,200 ml a day, while about two liters is a healthy maximum...
The video shows a young girl who is forced to drink a lot of water, she has to continue drinking although she can’t handle it anymore. This image is a metaphor for the forces in the fashion industry which influence girls to drink a lot of water and stay thin. Is is also a personal warning for water intoxication which is related to our own story...
In the video No Whites, a single white woman is looking for the perfect sperm donor. Dissatisfied with her own appearance, she is searching for a sperm donor with ideal characteristics, because she wants to have the perfect child. But how to find your perfect donor? In her search for a donor she contacts sperm banks, modeling agencies, places advertisements, and just simply asks men if they want to be her donor. She acts like it is business as usual; she just doesn’t understand why it is thought so strange she wants to have a black man as her sperm donor...
Lu Yan and Sun Mei are obsessed with their appearance, in particular with their body proportions. Like many other Chinese women and men, they want to be taller. The Western ideal of the perfect body has found its way into modern China, and in order to have the longer legs that guarantee a successful life, young people choose to undergo a very painful leg-lengthening operation...
Kelly is a personage which exists in a lot of girls nowadays. Kelly lives in Manhattan and is scared to death that somebody will recognize her and see how she behaves in her daily life. Kelly is totally obsessed with controlling everything she eats. She is alone and lives in her own world where only appearance, food, and collies exist. Kelly can’t handle the great number of food choices in Manhattan, which makes her life a living hell. Each day she collects free food samples, not to try in the shop, but rather ro take home with her. She doesn’t feel comfortable eating with other people around, and taking food samples liberates her from thinking about what to eat...
In this film we see a female twin performing an eating game with strange rules. They have to throw up a coin, the side of the coin decides who has to eat two portions and the other girl gets nothing. One wonders why one should deal with such a horrible game in this cold environment (ice cellar). In several case studies of twins we noticed that twins often deal with strange eating rules in other to get control over the situation they are in. To see twins deal with these strange eating rules is often very difficult to watch for both parents and outsiders. It shows how complex and difficult it can be to grow up as an individual being part of a twin...
“…you must realize that, from what we both have seen, John and Jilly are both very much in love with each other. People call it incest when brother and sisters treat each other as lovers, but from what I’ve seen, and not only in their case, it is dangerous for anyone, whether parent or relation or outsider, to speak of this, because the devision between the feeling of lovers and the feeling of brother and sister, especially in a case like this when they are twins, is a thing so delicate and subtle, and a thing so Cris-crossed with emotional complications that it requires extremely cautious and careful handling.”...
Sibling Rivalry (2004), makes emptiness and boredom conjugated with personal lack of satisfaction the central object of reflection. At the center of this work are two pretty twins in a hotel suite who ponder their relationship in mutual silence. This work is based on three sources...
“And yet there is a potential role for viewers in L.A. Raeven’s work (how else could it be art?), as Wild Zone 2 made clear.. The two boys lack the near-complete self-containment exhibited by the artists; they dawdle nervously around their space (that of the ICA itself) reading aloud from a series of rules the artists have supplied them so that the boys can become a perfectly matched pair like themselves..."
Little can be done to change a person physique. The body is a given, like height, ethnicity, and, on the whole, external appearance. All these naturally determined factors make the body what it is; some people are lucky with “Nature’s Choice” and have the correct build for ballet. But what about those who aren’t, and who desperately want to become professional ballerinas?...
Killer Queen deals with coercive drinking, flirting youngsters, beauty and behavioral codes. The work is a registration of a performance held in Casco, a contemporary art space in Utrecht. In the film, eight young models are participating in a question and answer game in which drinking a glass of champagne is punishment for a wrong answer. As the game progresses, the models, while outbidding each other and flirting, get increasingly drunk. A fragment of the classic song ‘Killer Queen’, by the British rock band Queen, sounds in the background...
This video installation is based on the true story of the twins June and Jennifer Gibbons and their war of silence. The sisters were engaged in a constant power struggle, competing desperately to assert their own personalities. At the same time, they were haunted by the fear of separation. Their tragedy was their inability to live with and without each other. They retreated into a world of their own making, excluding everyone else, speaking only to one another, and venting their anger against the world: us against them...
The title Wild Zone was not chosen by us. It was the title of a group show at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, where we were asked to contribute a new work. When we heard the title, we remembered a text by Deleuze in which he describes a ‘Wild Zone’ as a group of outlaws who live outside society. According to his text, those within society want to keep outlaws out because they are scared of them...
Eight models where invited to take part of this project. They were told nothing about it beforehand. On arrival, they were asked to strip down to their underwear and wait in a room from which they were not allowed to leave. Each received a file number, which was written on her left upper arm. The girls were observed and the behavior of each recorded in a file. In the beginning, they were allowed to withdraw from the project. Only one person chose to do so...
Ideal Individual starts with an advertisement placed in several newspapers, in this case, Der Standard in Vienna. In the advertisement “L.A. Raeven Analyse & Research Service” is looking for “Ideal Individuals” to participate in their investigation into "new future styles, changes in society, current trends in fashion and advertising."...