Jenny Lion’s life has been a study in peeking behind the curtain.
The new assistant professor of the practice of Art, Art History & Visual Studies was trained as a professional dancer but found her passion in moving image.
She soon found those moving images could be a canvas on which to explore complex societal issues. Her work in film and video is deeply connected to activism, often incorporating cinematic, participatory and experimental techniques.
Rather than seeing the dancer and activist as opposites, Lion straddles the lines between form and content, aesthetics and direct action. Her work explores complex issues such as land use, militarism, colonial history and race, as well as the carceral state and anti-Black police violence, occasionally through long-term collaborations.
Lion has contributed to various legal defense efforts by documenting state and police violence particularly through work with COPWatch in Minneapolis and iWitness Video, and her video work with military prisoners has been used by Amnesty International and broadcast internationally. She has also worked with the alternative artist television collective Paper Tiger Television and the LA-based research organization The Center for Land Use Interpretation.
Her individual moving image work, for which she recently garnered a Creative Capital Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a McKnight Media Arts Fellowship, often takes her into landscapes that are both beautiful and unsettling. In the vast, militarized expanses of Nevada and Utah, she navigates terrains that double as training grounds for white supremacist militias and sites of high-stakes U.S. military operations.
Lion explores the colliding cultures that coexist in the valley — ranchers, the US Navy, geothermal energy producers, the local Paiute-Shoshone tribe, prospectors and civilian militia. The piece involves, as collaborators, people she’s formed relationships with over the years, each illuminating often conflicting ways of perceiving and using the land. Amidst this backdrop, Lion explores the invisible histories embedded in the land — nuclear test sites hidden beneath unassuming concrete caps, where the ground still holds the seismic signatures of Cold War-era bomb detonations.
These sites, with their layered histories, reveal stories that are often largely unknown. For example, a seemingly ordinary building used for local SWAT team training was once the assembly site for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Her work is as much a formal investigation of light and landscape as it is an exploration of war's lingering shadows. In one installation, “Civil Twilights,” Lion circled three nuclear sites over 24 hours, recording the seemingly mundane events of the day as the light travels from dusk and dawn. By playing with timescales, Lion invites the spectator to reflect on how much-sustained attention might be required to witness an event.
In a feature experimental essay film “Gods, Bombs, Faults, and Power,” for many years Lion has been documenting the multiple uses — hunting, working, playing, practicing — of the abandoned Nevada town of Dixie Valley, a warfare training area the U.S. Navy uses to simulate distant war zones. Through her long-term engagement with these contested lands, Lion unearths narratives that continue to shape the present and reveal the complex interactions between history, politics, and the natural world.
Lion’s interests can also be seen in her curatorial work, which centers primarily around experimental film and artists’ video. Close to 50 Canadian and First Nations artists are included in her touring program and book “Magnetic North: Canadian Experimental Video,” for which she conducted research across Canada and the self-governing territory of Nunavut.
At Duke, she will be teaching film and video in the Cinematic Arts Program and for the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, developing new classes on artists’ video, experimental documentary practice, and activist and tactical media. This spring, Lion will be teaching CINE 311S / CINE 711S VIDEO, ART, POLITICS, which combines student video production with a historical artists’ video on police/state violence, AIDS, and presidential spectacle. Her teaching approach combines a deep integration of history and production, incorporating rigor, risk-taking, and fun conceptual experimentation.
Lions will be giving a talk on November 19 titled Ground Zero: “To observe is not to see…” about her work and experience in moving image.