19.03 — 23.05.2026
La SALLE DE BAINS
Lyon, France.
The first time Liv Schulman got money to make a film – a $1000 grant from a private art foundation – she decided to document the rapid shrinking of the sum as she had it converted from one currency to another. La Desaparición (2013) follows her while she makes her way to a number of currency exchange offices in the tri-border area of
Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, where inflation has relentlessly grown since the economic slump of the 2000s. As she loses control of her money, the artist in front of the camera shows signs of losing control of herself, slipping towards a state of paranoia that makes it difficult for her to distinguish between consciousness and her capital.
The city becomes her favorite film set and a character in its own right. Shaped and deformed by its economic activity, it is a living organism in which actors are introduced as disruptive elements and play deeply disturbed individuals. At the heart of Schulman’s films are indeed the
ordinary psychiatric conditions of populations living in the market economy era. These disorders are evidenced in bodies racked with unchecked desires and grandiose tirades that are imbued with a melancholic mood as they spill out postcapitalist prophesies. Her alienated characters – including the most salient of them from the threeseason series Control (2011-2016), the detective who wanders the city on foot – aren’t looking so much for their salvation as for a physical connection with reality and above all some meaning in what is happening in the world.
Sirco Ceguro (“Cecured Sircus,” would be a good translation that likewise switches around the initials of the two words), was shot in Microcentro, the heart of Buenos Aires, whose skyscrapers with their one-way glass façades recall the identical image seen in any commercial center around the world while concealing an economy on the brink of collapse. Except for a lone scene that shows some kind of spying taking place, Schulman chooses to film only the shimmering surfaces of the façades. The image constantly includes in the frame the reflection of her
filming what we are watching. That reflection reaches the eye at the very same time the surrounding reality does in an effect of reciprocal contamination and reversibility
that remains Liv Schulman’s secret sauce and source of her unique art, her great asset.
Beyond this formal conceit, however, the film also deals with doubles, simulacra, and speculation (drawing on the mental and financial senses of this last word as well as
its Latin root, speculum, mirror) in a plot centered on market derivatives known in that part of the stock-trading world as “mirror assets”. These are substitute assets that
are introduced into a market when companies, due to a weak economy for example, no longer have sales rights to the original assets. The fictional story features clownish secret agents whose look and behavior would raise heaps of suspicions were it not for the fact they slip totally under the radar – wouldn’t everything seem normal in a bonkers world? The narrative, moreover, is diffracted, split over several screens in the exhibition venue, which has been disguised to look like some public administrative bureau trying to compensate for the prevailing austere mood
with colorful walls. There are precious few works that describe with so much excitement a world that is so desperate. At this point in watching Sirco Ceguro, it’s hard to keep your hips from
swaying to the beat of the soundtrack (created by Miguel Garutti), which lends the video installation the energy of a ballet beyond the protagonists’ psychological and bodily exhaustion. Schulman’s work has a large dose of the comic throughout but that trait is far from being the only tool for her sharp critique or the only form of emancipation. Sirco Ceguro, by replacing the concept of opacity (in terms of power and finance) with that of reflection, also morphs into an allegory about a possible change of outlook and way of acting. And we clearly see
how in the deadly cycle of repetition slight variations in the reflection can bring something unexpected into view.
Julie Portier
translation by John O’Toole
photo : Jesús Alberto Benítez
Sirco Ceguro, 2026
installation vidéo
Réalisation et scénario : Liv Schulman
Production générale : Daniela Varone
Assistante à la réalisation : Lucía Benavente
Direction de la photographie : Daniela Prado Sarasúa
Son direct : Chiara Ribaudo et Emma Dupuy
Avec : Bel Gatti, Iara Portillo, Ana Paula Méndez, Lulo Demarco
Costumes : Vil Schulman
Assistant·es : Patricia Pedraza, Félix Kornberg, Juanita Tapia
Conception sonore, mixage et composition musicale : Miguel Garutti
Montage : Liv Schulman
Étalonnage : Armin Weihmuller Marchesini
Graphisme : Vanina Scolavino
Graphisme : Tom Cazin
Régie : Alexis Puget , Maxime Naudet, Lina Abdelhafez, David Rossi, Pierre-Olivier Arnaud, Mona Chancogne
Traduction et sous-titrage : Julie Portier avec Mao Welde et Vil Schulman
Sur une invitation de Julie Portier
La Salle de bains tient à remercier l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Lyon, l’Institut d’art contemporain de Villeurbanne et le Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Saint-Etienne Métropole pour leur aide et le prêt de matériel.
L’ensemble de films de Sirco Ceguro a reçu le soutien du centre d’art universitaire Torcuato Di Tella.
livschulman.com 