Strangers to Ourselves　

15 May – 28 May 2006

Jenny Lu

We are strangers to ourselves. Freud talks of the double, of that other self that comes about as the result of the repression of feelings or old beliefs. Everyday, we carry the other with us, like a weight, or as the psychic baggage. Even when we are alone, the other is screaming at some internal window in our mind. This other inside us, in our mind, is not just our burden, but can also become our enemy.　 So, we can be under attack by our own self, the body jerking to the tumult in the mind, or, at the most extreme, the cold detachment of suicide.　 We are strangers to ourselves, so much so that it seems we scream for recognition from ourselves, try to attract the attention of the stranger that is also us. We are strangers in our home, and the home is more than a physical place. It is our private space, our culture, our body. Home is the place for us to encounter the sense of uncanny (un-homely).

Strangers to Ourselves incorporates four of Jenny Lu’s video works. The selected works in this exhibition offer images of the conflicts between conscious intentions and repressed feelings and impulses. Jenny Lu’s work is imbued with a sense of unease, relating in part to her own experience of conflicting cultural influences as a Taiwanese artist working and living in London.

Jenny Lu won a ICA Beck’s Futures Student Prize for Film & Video in 2000 and since then has exhibited widely, nationally and internationally. Recent solo shows include Parapraxis at Blackburn Museum in the UK and Monsters from the Id at Alsager Gallery in Manchester Metropolitan University. Group shows includes Biblio at Triangle Gallery in London and Airborne System Mode in Macau. She graduated from MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2001, and is currently studying a PhD in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design.