Lyónn Wolf (formerly Emma Wolf-Haugh) is a visual artist, educator and writer based in Ireland and Germany and working internationally.
Lyónn’s work is shaped by economic necessity, engaging forms of recycling, thrift and ephemera resulting in soft modularity, wild archiving, and performative intervention, posing questions about value, accumulation, and authorship. They see a cultural centring of thrift as part of a tradition of queer-working class vernacular and ethics, promiscuous and adept at working within limitations. Their pedagogical and publishing work posits the imagination as a political tool with radical potential that can exist and erupt anywhere and at anytime. Lyónn’s work is often theatrical and collaborative generating forms of temporary collectivity, intent on the erotic and energetic capacity of brief encounter.
Lyónn has developed a trilogy of works since 2014 dealing with queer economies and spatial politics. The Re-appropriation of Sensuality, Sex in Public, and Domestic Optimism have been presented through various iterations at: The Project Arts Centre (IE), The Grazer Kunstverein (AT), Dundee Contemporary Arts (SCT), District Berlin (DE), Galway Arts Centre (IE), Den Frie Center Of Contemporary Art (DK), nGbK (DE), Archive Kabinet Berlin (DE), Survival Kit Festival (LV) and De Appel (NL).
Lyónn’s current work De-production plays with questions of time and trans temporality, thinking upon how the collapse of ecosystems brought about by colonial extractive logics shapes our understandings of reproduction, ageing and work.
image:credits
1. Domestic Optimism Act 1 – Modernism a Lesbian Lovestory, exhibition, installation view. Photo credit: Christine Winkler (2020)
2. Domestic Optimism Act 1 – Modernism a Lesbian Lovestory, exhibition installation view. Photo credit: Christine Winkler (2020)
3. Oh Infamy – we eat electric light – party, performance & video, video still by artists (2022)
4. Poverty of Vision, performance. Photo credit: Louis Haugh (2017)
5. Sex in Public-Dyke Action, performance & photo series. Photo credit: artist (2018)
web:link
www.lyonnwolf.com
Lyónn is co-founder of The Many Headed-Hydra (TMHH), aqueous-decolonising collective since 2015 working on long term critical and poly-vocal projects across the seas that connect Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Iceland, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania and beyond. TMHH continue to work with artists, activists, curators and writers internationally. including: Aziz Sohail, Natasha Ginwala, Hannah Black, Almagul Menlibayeva, Fatimah Asghar, Sondra Perry and Tejal Shah among many others.
Lyónn is founder of The Reading Troupe – Disruptive Pedagogy, workshop and zine series since 2013. Disruptive pedagogical engagements include: National College for Art and Design Dublin (2020), Colomboscope Festival Sri Lanka (2019), CCA Glasgow (2019), Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2018), Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2018), Gasworks, London (2017), Klöntal Triennale (2017), The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2017), The Universität der Künste Berlin (2017). Lyónn’s commissioned writing has appeared in Language is Skin, Scripts for Performances, Archive Books (2018), Scores for Daily Living, K. Verlag (2020), they are the editor of the anthology Having A KiKi – Queer Desire & Public Space published by PVA (2016). Their monograph Text in Public – Zine Performances and Rants was published by Scriptings Berlin, eclectic Publishing and Archive Books Berlin/Milan/Dakar (2021).
Lyónn was awarded the IMMA 1000 Residency by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2019/2020)and was awarded a research fellowship by the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung 2022/23. Their work is held in the permanent collections of The Irish Museum of Modern Art and The Arts council of Ireland. Lyónn was recently awarded the Martin Toonder award (2024).
Here, queering the narrative is not simply a cumulative project of inserting more queer lives into the scene in order to establish a fuller historical account. Rather, throughout Domestic Optimism, the whole historiographic approach is queer insofar as it continually unsettles, through retellings that are unapologetically shot through with open-ended speculation, fantasy, and play.
While the project presents an historiographic imperative to reappraise and acknowledge the untidy realities of collective entanglements, the promise contained within this critical provocation is that, as the women at the Paris salon in the film discover, “Motion is not only possible but also pleasurable.” Rather than frame the imperative in terms of extra work or burdensome distraction, Wolf-Haugh’s Domestic Optimism offers it as an invitation: here is a site of abundant possibility, pleasure, and proliferation.
— Genius Vs. Lesbian, Amelia Groom, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal LA, 2021
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