Dr Wiebke Leister

Biography

Wiebke Leister is a German artist and researcher. She is course leader for MA Photography at London College of Communication and has exhibited and published her work internationally. She is a co-organizer of the Photography and the Contemporary Imaginary research hub and the Writing Photographs research group, convener of the Theatre of Photography research network, a core member of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre and a UAL Teaching Scholar at University of the Arts London. She also taught fine art photography and the integration of theory and practice at Fachhochschule Bielefeld, Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen, and at The Photographers' Gallery in London, and has worked in different museum contexts, organizing conferences and exhibitions. 2018-19 she will be DAAD Visiting Professor of Photography at Fachhochschule Bielefeld, Germany.

Wiebke's work challenges the limitations of photographic representation and individual likeness, often focusing on the human face as a canvas, a medium or an agent. Actively involving the viewer in the promises and failures of visual representation, her work engages with the interfacing of human boundaries and explores how we encounter ourselves in others. As an artist she works with photography, drawing and collage; her writing is in English and German and her written practice spans from academic papers and reviews to fiction, including text-based works for the gallery.

Her research Unjoyful Laughter and the Non-Likeness of Photographic Portraiture¹ (2000-06) questions the representational power of photography as a chance to rethink the photograph as a rather fleeting imago. The case study of laughter allowed her to look at the fleeting iconography of the open mouth, immobilized by the photographic process. The project ´Lovers, Liars and Laughter´ (2006-08) extended this earlier research interest in the mouth and the photographic portrayal of laughing and smiling, now looking at the rather invisible and unattainable features of love and kissing. Her current theory-practice project 'Echoes and Afterlives' (2016-) takes Japanese Noh theatre as a starting point to think about non-representational modes of photographic performance.