Ivana Ivana Ivana

by Isla MC

Last night us Loose Lips girls went on our strangest jaunt for a long time. We tripped down to the Oxo Tower Bargehouse to see the light installation exhibition ‘Lightstrokes’ by South African artist Bern Bowers. The press release promised a ‘holographic drag queen with three-metre-long moving lips’. We were excited!

We arrived and were quickly ushered into a darkened room strewn with sequins and roses. And then! Suddenly a giant pair of lips appears out of the darkness, projected onto a circular screen (framed with fabulous pink feathers). Moving and talking in a slightly scary Eastern European voice. We didn’t quite understand what the lips (belonging to fictional drag queen Ivana Ivanavich) were on about but it didn’t really seem to matter!

So that was, as you probably imagine, pretty cool. Well, at least pretty different. But the show trumped itself when giant dancing shoes were projected onto the floor. That was amazing. Especially since Joanna was *this* close to interacting with the exhibition (not encouraged).

Upstairs the exhibition continued with various montages mounted on lightboxes that mostly featured pop culture and celebs – dead and alive. The celeb images were interspersed with other news or political images to create an interesting comment on society and culture. I’m not sure what the comment was but who cares when you get to feast your eyes on a hilarious montage of stamps made up of absurd images of Richard Branson, entitled ‘The Dame’ or something similar. Random but genius.

Lightstrokes is on (for free!) until 25th March 2007.