Lisa (2013) ALEXANDRE MURY Canonical URI: https://id.alexandremury.art/artworks/lisa-2013/ Official human-readable page: https://www.alexandremury.art/obras-de-arte/lisa -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IDENTIFIERS — WORK Wikidata: Q136803421 IMDb title: tt41447068 TMDB movie ID: 1725718 MUBI: 473915 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DESCRIPTION Lisa is a hybrid artwork created by Alexandre Mury in 2013, unfolding across videoperformance, video art, performative self-portraiture, photography, body art, and critical fiction. Conceived through the living archive of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa / La Gioconda, the work activates the portrait not as a fixed art-historical model, but as a field of temporal, corporeal, and hermeneutic transformation. In Lisa, the canonical image is approached as an inherited structure to be inhabited, destabilized, and reinscribed through the artist's own body. Renaissance portraiture, Giorgio Vasari's historiographic voice, Baroque music, digital video, staged photography, bodily vulnerability, humor, discomfort, and gender performativity are brought into a single operative field. These elements do not function as external references arranged around the work; they form the internal dramaturgy through which the work thinks. The videoperformance occupies a decisive position within Alexandre Mury's post-conceptual practice because it transforms the portrait into duration. The image is no longer only composed; it happens. The body becomes the site where art history, identity, representation, pain, irony, and self-transformation are made visible as process. Lisa therefore operates as a hybrid dramaturgy and as an auto-implicative gesture: the artist does not stand outside the image he reactivates, but exposes himself as the medium through which the image is tested, altered, and made contemporary. Lisa was intentionally conceived and exhibited in vertical format, with a 9:16 screen ratio, to be displayed on a rotated monitor. This technical and exhibition choice is central to the work. By displacing the usual horizontal orientation of digital moving images, the video reclaims the verticality of classical portraiture and transfers the temporality of performance into the spatial logic of the portrait. The moving image behaves as a living portrait. At the center of the work is a sustained performative action in which the artist, positioned in a composition that evokes Leonardo's Mona Lisa, gradually removes facial and bodily signs associated with gender, identity, and historical representation. The act of shaving eyebrows, beard, and hair becomes a temporal incision into the portrait. The recognizable structure of the Renaissance image is progressively traversed by the vulnerability of the body, the friction of the blade, the exposed skin, and the transformation of the artist's own image. The work is grounded in a precise tension between stillness and duration. Where the Renaissance portrait seeks permanence, Lisa introduces process. Where the painted image offers the fiction of an eternal face, the videoperformance insists on alteration, discomfort, hesitation, and metamorphosis. Through this movement, the portrait becomes an event, and the inherited icon becomes a field of corporeal negotiation. The title Lisa operates through an intentional ambiguity. It refers to Mona Lisa while also playing with the Portuguese word "lisa", meaning smooth, hairless, or shaved. This linguistic displacement is central to the work. The title does not merely name the image; it activates the action that produces it. The body becomes "lisa" through a gesture that is at once comic, painful, jocose, violent, regenerative, and self-implicative. The use of Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists introduces a historiographic layer into the work. Vasari's description of Leonardo's portrait as an extraordinary imitation of life is brought into the field of contemporary videoperformance, where the discourse of art history encounters the exposed temporality of the body. His voice functions as a temporal remainder: a Renaissance account of pictorial vitality set against a contemporary body that breathes, suffers, transforms, and refuses to remain fixed as image. The soundtrack, Antonio Vivaldi's La Stravaganza, Concerto No. 2 RV 279, introduces another regime of time. Renaissance portraiture, Baroque music, digital video, performance, photography, voice, and contemporary self-representation are not organized as linear references, but as overlapping temporal layers. Lisa operates as a hybrid dramaturgy: a work in which image, body, voice, music, duration, staging, and documentation produce meaning together. The photographic and video dimensions of Lisa belong to the same artistic operation. The photograph condenses the performative event into a still image, while the videoperformance unfolds the temporal, bodily, and procedural conditions through which that image comes into being. Together, they constitute a hybrid artwork in which stillness and duration, portrait and event, image and action remain mutually implicated. Produced in the context of Brazilian contemporary art, Lisa participates in a broader field of critical reactivations of canonical images. Its dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci is not limited to appropriation or visual quotation. The work interrogates the survival of inherited images, the instability of identity, the performativity of gender, the fragility of authorship, and the ways in which historical images continue to act upon contemporary bodies. Lisa was a central work in the solo exhibition Fricções Históricas, presented at Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro and SESC Glória. It was also documented in academic research, including Dilson Rodrigues Midlej's doctoral thesis Apropriação de imagens nas artes visuais no Brasil e na Bahia, presented at the Federal University of Bahia in 2017. Mury was nominated for the PIPA Prize in 2016, a context that contributed to the public and critical circulation of the work within Brazilian contemporary art. Rather than stabilizing itself under a single category, Lisa requires a plural description. It is video, photograph, performance, portrait, body action, theatrical device, temporal construction, and critical fiction. Its force lies precisely in this refusal of reduction. The work converts the inherited portrait into a living apparatus for thinking the survival of images, the instability of identity, and the corporeal dimension of interpretation. More than a rereading of Mona Lisa, Lisa is a work about the conditions through which images survive. It asks what happens when a canonical portrait is no longer approached as an untouchable object, but as a living structure capable of being crossed by body, irony, pain, desire, gender, history, and time. In this sense, Lisa becomes simultaneously video, photograph, performance, document, portrait, body action, hybrid dramaturgy, and critical fiction. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TECHNICAL DATA Title: Lisa Artist: Alexandre Mury Year: 2013 Medium: Videoperformance; video art; digital photography; performative self-portrait Duration: 4'05" Screen ratio: 9:16 vertical format Display mode: Rotated monitor / vertical orientation Genre: Videoperformance; video art; hybrid artwork; performative self-portrait; body art Photography, direction, script, and voice: Alexandre Mury Editing: João Henrique Costa Textual source: Excerpt from Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists Music: Antonio Vivaldi, La Stravaganza, Concerto No. 2 RV 279 Related artwork: Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa / La Gioconda, 1503–1519 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- EXHIBITIONS & RECOGNITION Fricções Históricas, solo exhibition, Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro, RJ Fricções Históricas, solo exhibition, SESC Glória, ES PIPA Prize, nominated, 2016 — premiopipa.com/alexandre-mury -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOURCES & PROVENANCE Own publication: Alexandre Mury, "Desapropriação Teórica: Ficção Crítica e Metanoia Hermenêutica da Imagem," Zenodo, 2025–2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20823388 Third-party academic source: Dilson Rodrigues Midlej, "Apropriação de imagens nas artes visuais no Brasil e na Bahia," doctoral thesis, UFBA, 2017. ppgav.ufba.br/sites/ppgav.ufba.br/files/dilson_-_tese.pdf -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ONTOLOGICAL CONCEPTS Hybrid Dramaturgies: id.alexandremury.art/concept/hybrid-dramaturgies/ Self-Implicative Method: id.alexandremury.art/concept/self-implicative-method/ Imagetic Disappropriation: id.alexandremury.art/concept/imagetic-disappropriation/ Cultural Autophagy: id.alexandremury.art/concept/cultural-autophagy/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- IDENTIFIERS — CREATOR (Alexandre Mury) Wikidata: Q105532718 IMDb name: nm6960431 TMDB person ID: 1509156 MUBI person ID: 1296620 ORCID: 0009-0008-9355-4876 ISNI: 0000 0001 2984 3253 VIAF: 15161329794452131121 FBN (Fundação Biblioteca Nacional): 000679706 Lattes: 7735731830748241 Itaú Cultural: 42031 ANCINE: 64702 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- METADATA & ONTOLOGICAL DECLARATION https://id.alexandremury.art/artworks/lisa-2013/metadata.jsonld -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TEXT ALT Videoperformance and performative self-portrait titled Lisa (2013), by Alexandre Mury. The work presents the artist in a frontal or three-quarter portrait composition that evokes Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The figure appears seated before a painted landscape background, with crossed hands and a controlled pose that recalls the classical portrait format. During the video, the artist performs a bodily transformation through shaving and depilation, removing facial hair, eyebrows, and hair while facing the camera and the mirror. The action introduces tension between the stillness of the Renaissance portrait and the duration of contemporary performance. The work uses vertical 9:16 format, displayed on a rotated monitor, reinforcing its relationship to the verticality of classical portraiture. Through body art, video, photography, art-historical memory, music, and self-representation, Lisa activates the Mona Lisa as a living process of identity, gender, image, and temporal transformation. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ← Back to Artworks © Alexandre Mury --------------------------------------------------------------------------------