Liza Jesse-Katz
Liza Jesse-Kats is a Ukrainian-born, London-based performance, moving image and multi-media artist. Her practice is rooted in a tension between tenderness and confrontation, structure and intuition. Trained in the flat world of drawing and painting, Liza has since expanded into the tactile, the bodily, the immersive—building sensory disjunctions through performance, sculpture, and moving image.
At the heart of Kats’ work is the body—its presence, its pain, its symbolic weight. Kats treats it as both a site and a tool of inquiry. Whether she’s blindfolded in a live performance, manipulating visual symbols, objects, rope and expanding foam into “3D paintings,” or editing a performance video sketch that grew from a gesture or a memory of a dance - she aims to cut into something raw. Liza’s toolbox is intentionally diverse: construction materials, cameras, thread, found objects, her writing or her own voice. Each demands a different type of bodily attention—from the heavy labour of sanding and stretching to the vulnerability and release of singing or moving in an empty room.
In Jesse-Kats’ performances, which often veer into the uncanny and folk horror, she creates unsettling intimacy: white cubes become tiny stages; elevators and libraries, temporary altars. A masked figure smiles too widely, a quiet act becomes charged with violence or care. The viewer is positioned as a witness—sometimes complicit, always watching. These performances live on as films, becoming hybrid objects: documentation, sketch, and standalone work.
Liza Jesse-Kats’ recent moving image project, Ya Pokudayu Tebe / I’m Leaving You (2025), is a collage of cinematic fragments—home footage, dream logic, and ethnographic impulse. In it, she subverts conventional use of sound and text in film to reject the flattening of Ukrainian identity into war trauma. Instead, she seeks radical joy, tender defiance, and unromantic love. Across all her media, she works to subvert inherited narratives, to trace the quiet structures that shape memory and migration, and to use her own mind as a case study in belonging and dislocation.
Symbols recur in Liza’s material practice: the star, the childlike-drawn house, the bird. They echo Soviet pasts, childhood intuition, and unspoken memory. Red threads through everything (paintings to performances)—grief, girlhood, blood, power, warning, continuity. Liza lets emotion guide form, letting each piece arise from a subconscious premeditation. The result is not a strategy, but a series of intuitive ruptures that create disjunctions between the senses—fragile offerings that ask the viewer to hold a piece of her.
