Monade Li is a French artist, producer and educator working with the media of graphics and also experiments in video, photography and digital collage.
The artist evolves at the border between plastic arts and visual arts, performance, music.
She explores the spatio-corporal resonance of ‘our human condition’.
She leads Monade Art Residency (workshops for creation and research) since 2022.
Duplication leads to disappearance:
Her first self-produced experimental art video, an underwater shooting by day, “Diatomée” turned into a ‘corps-métrage’ (« body- measurement ») concept. Then came out “Claire Obscure”, an underwater shooting by night and “Malojá”, originally scored by Steven Severin (Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Glove), shot by the sea shore.
Her debut films’ triptych was done.
In homage to Bergman’s film «Persona», her fourth shortfilm shot in South of Iceland, called “Candice”, scored by Steven Severin featuring Julia Kent on cello, was presented at « Air d’Islande » festival in Paris, in Hong Kong and also in Orkney in 2015.
During her stay in 2016 at ArtsIceland residency in Ísafjörður, she worked on an experimental shortfilm titled « Hollie », scored by the epic musician-performer Dirk Ivens; it is an homage to the Icelandic painter Georg Guðni and based on « Gotuljod / Poème de la rue » by the Icelandic author Sigurður Pálsson. Hollie was in competition at « Festival du Nouveau Cinéma » in Montreal in 2017 and also at « Bideodromo » festival in Bilbao in 2018.
The encounter with the Icelandic culture and people in 2013 led her to do some more research on the Icelandic literature and art for her experiments.
Her art video called « The Selkie », which is based on the seal woman legend, was premiered in Akureyri, Iceland, in October 2019.
With the triptych films ‘Candice’, (2014) ‘The Selkie’ (2019) and ‘Deirdre et une Tristesse humaine’ (2022), the artist interrogates the duplication with resonances that leads to the disappearance of ‘humanity’.
In the beginning of 2023, Monade Li worked on ‘Filomena’, an experimental diptych art film embodied by the music of Rudolph Moser (Einstürzende Neubauten). Now completed (see trailer here: http://limonadeart.com/2023/03/15/filomena/).
For Filomena, she takes up the theme covered in her first film « Diatomée », where the oneiric body, confused with the elements, fits the shape of « tense and twisted postures linking the conscious and the unconscious, the exterior and the interior ».
Heiress and inspired by the avant-garde, abstract, dada and pioneer female artists such as Germaine Krull, Berenice Abbot, Ilse Bing, Florence Henri, Dora Maar, Claude Cahun, Laure Albin Guillot, Loïe Fuller, Musidora, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber, Romaine Brooks, Leonor Fini, Alice Guy, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Francesca Woodman, Charlotte Perriand, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Jane Evrard, etc.
