WOMAN: protagonist Part One in human appearance. Repressed voices of different ages and backgrounds; persons who have been insulted and silenced; recipients of hurt, assault and violation; victims of hate, rape, and abuse; surviving dependents; betrayed or discarded lovers; assumed hags, wise-women, and witches.
DEMONESS: protagonist Part Two in demonic appearance; woman’s living ghost. Released voices; agents of change; phantoms from the past; avengers, she-devils and furies.

Echoes & Callings is an encounter with angry spirits from Japanese Noh drama and storytelling; women characters, referred to as deranged or jealous, unable to speak for themselves during their human lives. They transform into demons, forced from their bodies; furious ghosts, broken by grief or transfigured by rage, pain, or betrayal. They are encountered through their transformative states, their images returning as ghosts, apparitions, and echoes, seeking revenge and release. Their imaginary genealogy is followed, re-embodied, contradictory, intertextual—speaking of silence and manifestation, distress and embodiment, stillness, and fury; building the crescendo of a single expression, from figuration to abstraction. They conjure another self from their liminal existence as they reveal themselves as terrifying images. They have existed throughout times and cultures. Today, more than ever, their images are recognised as released and untamed. And finally, speaking out.

‘“Listen your way in / with your mouth,” wrote Paul Celan, in his poem, Die Posaunenstelle. This is what we must do, enter through the screaming mouth. Now chisel is put away; mask is silent. Woman abandoned, pain compressed. Silent scream. Attuned, we might hear this sound through auralisation, hearing an absent presence—thin, high—above the muted, stylised voice of the shite. In Seiobo There Below, László Krasznahorkai writes of a Noh mask maker creating a shiro hannya mask, thought never occuring that “what his hands have brought into the world is a demon, and that it will do harm”. Echoes and Callings offers us startling insights into that fractured world.’
–> David Toop

Wiebke Leister is a German artist and researcher living in London. Her works challenge the limitations of visual representation, often addressing the human face as canvas, medium, or agent. Seeking transformative and performative conditions of portraiture, the image becomes a catalyst for exploring human boundaries and how one encounters oneself in others.