Liz Rosenfeld

Liz Rosenfeld

Interdisciplinary artist addressing the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, queer hypocritical desire, and questioning the ways bodies deal with the responsibility and privilege of taking up space.

Liz Rosenfeld (b.1979, USA/DE) is a Berlin based visual and performance artist who works in film/video, performance, and experimental writing practice. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz's work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, approaching questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Embracing an auto- theoretical style, Liz's writing is rooted in questions that contend with how queer ontologies are grounded in variant hypocritical desire(s.)

Liz’s films and performances have shown in international museums and venues including The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw., The Forum Expanded Program of the 2022 Berlinale, Antifestval, Bärenzwinger Berlin, Mousonturm, Tanzhaus nrw, Kampnagel, 2019 Bergen Assembly, Berlinischer Galerie, Mapa Teatro, Sophiensæle, The Hebbel am Ufer Theatre, The Gorki Theater, Arts Admin, Galerie Emanuel Layr, The Tate Modern, The Hammer Museum, The Leslie Lohman Museum, The Barbican Centre, The CAC- Glasgow, Tramway, The Stedelijk Museum, The C/O Gallery, and The Deutsches Historisches Museum.

Liz’s film, White Sands Crystal Foxes, was nominated for Best Experimental Short Film by the 2022 Teddy Awards of the Berlinale Film Festival. Liz was one of the nominated artists for the Antifestival 2022 Shortlist Live! Award.

Written in collaboration with Dr. Joao Florencio, Liz's debut short auto- theory book, "Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising," will be released by Rutgers University Press/Q- Public in 2025.

Liz’s short films are represented by Video Data Bank and LUX Moving Image.

Liz Rosenfeld received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, followed by an MA from The Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 2007.

Tremble

HD Video / 06:27 min / 2022

Tremble is an immersive, dual projection video installation, with surround sound.

Flutter. Shutter. Quiver. Throb. Vibrations oscillate between all the holes and all the folds. Exposed under full house lights, a lone body trembles with the architecture of an empty darkroom. Closed due to COVID-19, in the darkroom of one of Berlin’s oldest gay cruising bars, through tableaus of nuanced movement, the artist's body proposes an ambiguous future towards abundance and desire. Skin and flesh palpitate with unknown anticipation against porous materials soaked with stale fluids, ghostly utterances, and queer potentials. This is not a memorial to what was once possible, but rather, a proposal to what this space can still become. Always an infinite hole. Always a threshold. The vibrant material of fat and flesh rock in service to ecologies and bodies not yet known.

Sound Design: Neda Sanai
Cinematography: Imogen Heath
Still Photography: Christa Holka
Production Assistant: Kiki Mager

What's At the Bottom

HD Video / 11:10 min / 2022

Original Voiceover By Jón Albert Méndez

"Where do you see holes…. how do you feel about them?" In a quiet and contemplative short filmic work, Liz Rosenfeld asked artist Jón Albert Méndez to re- call the one summer evening, when they happen to meet each in Reykjavik. As Jón beautifully recalls the few hours that the two artists spent together, Jón dives deep into connections between holes, emotional ecologies, bodies, and gender. As Jón meditates on holes, the camera scans different Icelandic landscapes, in search of all the holes: ancient laval fields, ocean inlets, the peaks of fjords, and the midnight sun. Shot on Super 8 film in the Summer of 2021 while serving as an artist in residence at GilsfjordurArts, situated deep within the Westfjords, Rosenfeld draws over the skin of film, animating their "hole drawing technique," which they developed while in residence.

This film was made with support from the Goethe Institut in frame of their cultural initiative Goethe Morph* Iceland.