No Words. 2023. USA. Written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson. Digital. 5 min.
Seeing is Believing. 1990. USA. Written and directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson. Digital. 58 min.
In the early 1990s, Lynn Hershman Leeson created America’s Finest, an interactive installation centered on an M16 rifle that addressed the dominance of gun violence in decades of US military interventions and day-to-day life. Years later, the artist returned to this theme in No Words, a powerful film about the unaddressed, tragic consequences of school shootings throughout the US. Grief, absences, and ghosts also meet in Seeing Is Believing, in which a 13-year-old uses a discarded super 8mm camera to find her missing father and ease a sense of displacement in the quest for her own identity.