Lena Herzog

The work of the multidisciplinary conceptual artist Lena Herzog is centered around themes of ritual and gesture, loss and dislocation. In order to convey them, she has explored the intersection of art and science both as a subject and as a process, by utilizing early photographic, contemporary and alternative experimental techniques in her printing work, as well as cutting-edge sound, immersive installation and virtual reality technologies for other projects. Herzog’s work is mostly expressionist: form alludes to content and vice versa. Having grown up among scientists in the Ural mountains on the Western border of Siberia, she continued her formal education at the University of St. Petersburg, Russia, studying languages and literature, and later, in California, at Mills College and Stanford, where her focus shifted to the history and philosophy of science. After discovering photography in the late 1990s, she apprenticed to Italian and French master printers, focusing on early and alternative photographic processes. Open to experimentation in her darkroom, Herzog combined techniques from the beginning of the photographic medium, like Pyrogallol, with contemporary digital ones. Herzog travelled around the world exploring a wide range of subjects from pilgrimage and religion, dance and ritual to uncanny geological phenomena, wonder cabinets, and vanishing languages. She has published six books, monographs of photography; and portfolios of her work have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and Harper’s Magazine. Her work has been internationally exhibited and collected by major museums and institutions including the International Center of Photography in New York City, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), California, Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, Museo de Carruajes, in Seville, Spain, and at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. A captivating public speaker and conversationalist, she has led illuminating public lectures, presentations, and conversations about photography, language, rituals and wonder cabinets worldwide. Her most recent conceptual work was dedicated to the loss of world’s linguistic diversity and it is called Last Whispers: Oratorio for Vanishing Voices, Collapsing Universes and A Falling Tree . In it, Herzog used historical voice recordings of extinct and endangered languages spanning a century as well as made-audible gravitational waves caused by supernovae in order to create an immersive spatialized oratorio of vanishing languages and dying stars. Last Whispers is a multimedia, audio video installation, a public platform and a virtual reality (VR). The project is an ecosystem that explores the global mass extinction of languages. It premiered at the British Museum in London in 2016, and has traveled to Switzerland, Germany, Mexico, France, Brazil, Canada, and throughout the United States. Last Whispers Virtual Reality premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and garnered acclaim and prizes at over twenty major VR festivals around the world. Last Whispers’ 45 min immersive installation was shown at major concert halls and theaters like The Kennedy Center in Washington DC, while in France, it showed at the drama theater Le Théâtre de la Ville and at the Paris opera house Le Théâtre du Châtelet. Apprenticed to Ivan Dalla Tana, Milan, and Marc Valesella in early and alternative printing processes (gum, platinum, pyro, ‘gold’ printing). Lena Herzog “LOST SOULS” (2010) With essays by Luc Sante and Graham Burnett Published by de.MO & International Center of Photography, New York ISBN 978-0-9825-9080-5