Carla Liesching


Carla Liesching is a South African artist based in Ithaca, New York.
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Early life and education

Carla Liesching was born in Cape Town in 1985 and was raised in various small towns around SA, mainly in the Eastern Cape. She received her BFA, specialising in photography, video and sound installation, from Rhodes University in Grahamstown and moved to Johannesburg shortly after graduating in 2007.

Life and work

She has spent time working in Taipei, Taiwan and is currently based in New York City.
Her work investigates human relationships to structure, particularly ideological shifts in geographic organisation and narrative. Liesching's practice addresses conceptions of self in relation to place, movement, distance and belonging. Interested in the photographic portrait's agency in the shaping of identity narratives, Liesching creates archives of staged environmental portraits, which parodically hearken back to the medium's early involvement with human classification systems and pseudo-scientific exploration "critically examines South Africa's colonial past". The book is made up of both photographs and personal prose. The photographs—clippings of images from tourist pamphlets, old magazines, current newspapers and family albums—focus on the gardens and grounds of the Cape of Good Hope. The work is about colonialism, tourism and trade.
She is the program coordinator for the School of Criticism & Theory.

Publications

Solo exhibitions