Babsi Loisch

how we are in time and space: films and videos by Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Babsi Loisch, and Jennifer West

This virtual event brings together four artists and their works for an intergenerational dialogue. The videos/films to be discussed are available to watch from May 14 through May 28. This virtual event is free and open to everyone. Please RSVP to receive your Zoom link. Presented by the Armory and Los Angeles Filmforum, this conversation will be moderated by curator Michael Ned Holte.


Babsi Loisch
can’t put it back
2022, digital video, 8:40

Making its premiere, Babsi Loisch’s video can’t put it back (2022) is a meditation on time and wonder during the pandemic. Shot in Los Angeles and Hawaii, where the artist and her family moved during Covid, the video centers on the experiences of two children as they investigate the world, its sensuous pleasures and its cruel mysteries: The title of the video is provided by one of the children, who comes to terms with the loss of a flower petal that can’t be mended. In the artist’s words, “It has the logic and aesthetics of a homevideo, it's a witness to the boredom and the sweetness, the exploration, repetition and experimentation that are kind of the pillars of the crumbling parenting of little children during a pandemic.” The video extends the artist’s ongoing interest in care and maternal labor as “nearly invisible in the context and discourse of contemporary art.” Seemingly casual, the unhurried video subtly captures the strange rhythms of daily life, punctuated by children’s drawings and “unexplainable mouth sounds.”

Babsi Loisch is an interdisciplinary artist based in Hawaii and Los Angeles. She was born in Vienna, Austria. She holds a MPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, a BFA in Photography from the Glasgow School of Art, an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts. Loisch’s work addresses the body as the simultaneous site of production, care, and labor. Her final exhibition at CalArts included video, drawings, and sculpture, all produced in the first months after giving birth and while working in the institute’s designated Lactation Room, a shed created to comply with state law. She subsequently presented a lactation project for Palms Park for the food-themed CurrentLA 2019 public art triennial. With Fiona Yun-Jui Chang, Loisch organized the curatorial project Homework at ArtCenter DTLA in 2020. She has participated in exhibitions and events at LACE, Los Angeles; Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena; RedLine, Denver; and Video Social Club, Plymouth, UK.