Lis Rhodes – Telling Invents Told

Telling Invents Told is the first collection of writings by artist and filmmaker Lis Rhodes. It includes the influential essay Whose History? alongside texts from works such as Light Reading, Pictures on Pink Paper and A Cold Draft, together with new and previously unpublished materials. Since the 1970s, Rhodes has been making radical and experimental work that challenges hegemonic narratives and the power structures of language. Her writing addresses urgent political issues – from the refugee crisis to workers’ rights, police brutality, racial discrimination and homelessness – as well as film history and theory, from a feminist perspective. An important figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, Rhodes was also a founding member of Circles, the first British distributor of film, video and performance by women artists.

“Lis Rhodes’ writings, like her films, are precise and cutting, using language to dismantle language, to question its relation to power, legal frameworks and gender. Anyone who has heard Lis speak knows that her voice is disarmingly quiet but profound and powerful – her words ring clear with an urgency that continues to be as pressing now as it was decades ago. This long overdue collection provides a unique opportunity to read and re-read her practice.” – Aura Satz, artist

“Whose history? It is hard to think of a question more central to our moment, or an artist who has posed it more insistently and urgently than Lis Rhodes. Her films comprise one of the most radical rethinkings of experimental film and politics of the last fifty years; they are like flashbulbs, exposing the physiognomies of power in the cracks of everyday experience. Her writing is both an integral part of her extraordinary filmmaking and a continuation of it. Partisan and sceptical, lyrical and hopeful, it is a voice of resistance to reality as it has been told or sold to us.” – Mike Sperlinger, Oslo Academy of Fine Art