Multimedia artist Lynn Hershman Leeson is known for her use of video, performance, and the creation of avatars to interrogate issues of gender, surveillance, and the representation of the feminine. At the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, she presents her groundbreaking life project The Electronic Diaries (1984–ongoing), in which she unflinchingly exposes her own life against the backdrop of contemporary technological developments, repeatedly questioning how these advances shape our humanity, our ways of living together, and our ways of relating to each other. The chapters developed between 1984 and 2019 are complemented here, for the first time, by her most recent one: About Time (2025). Recording intimate confessions over decades and addressing themes such as trauma and personal transformation, in The Electronic Diaries the artist sees the camera as a confiding mirror, creating a space for narrative experimentation that anticipates contemporary discussions about self-image and the digitalization of subjectivity.
In her work, Leeson combines technological means and artificial intelligence to, in many ways, reclaim the narrative of her own existence, destabilizing dynamics of domination and pointing to the possibility of negotiating with the world through self-archiving and digital mediation. The Electronic Diaries fulfills the persistence of a project that, for decades, has evinced the transformation of technology and of the artist herself. By continuously recording herself, Leeson not only documents her personal history but also anticipates debates about the performativity of identity in the age of social networks, hyperconnectivity, and digital manipulation.
Her electronic diaries bear witness to a time when the boundary between the so-called “real” and the fabricated is dissolving into screens and algorithms, in which identity no longer seems to be a fixed destination, but a file that is constantly being edited. Thus, Leeson’s work is inscribed in the very mutable skin of our era, where to exist is to rewrite oneself, time and again, in the volatile memory of machines, while to exist is also to rework the escapes from an increasingly policed and vigilant digital fabric.
