
Mari Mahr: Lili Brik
22 March – 29 June 2025, 11am – 5pm
This display in the Research Space brings together photographic works made in 1982 by Kettle’s Yard collection artist Mari Mahr (b. 1941, Chile, lives and works in London) from her Lili Brik series.
The series focuses on the Russian artist and author Lili Brik (née Lilya Yuryevna Kagan, 1891-1978) who was part of the literary and artistic avant-garde in Russia from 1914, and to whom the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky dedicated many of his works.
Curated by Inga Fraser, Senior Curator, House & Collection
Further Information
Mahr’s images are constructed using a method she often used, whereby earlier printed photographs of particular places serve as backdrops in her studio, in front of which she assembles related objects. These arrangements are then rephotographed and printed, resulting in compositions that disrupt the viewer’s sense of scale and perspective. Whereas the background photographs used in these series were often taken on location, and are closer to documentary photography in their style, the objects in the foreground were taken from her domestic environments at the time. As her friend, the filmmaker Nigel Finch has described, Mahr was ‘fabricating a world from glimpsed events, snippets of overheard conversation, and borrowed objects.’
The faces that feature in the Lili Brik images are those of Mahr’s mother and grandmother. It was certain old photographs of her grandmother who lived in Paris in the interwar years which reminded Mahr of Lili Brik especially. Family, and matrilineal correspondence are important themes in this sequence of works, as is the assemblage nature of memory.
About Mari Mahr
Mari Mahr was born in Santiago, Chile in 1941, where her Jewish family had emigrated to from Hungary to escape persecution during the Second World War. Her father was a Bauhaus-trained architect and among her parents’ friends in Chile were the photographer Antonio Quintana and the writer Pablo Neruda. Mahr initially worked as a translator, but after the family returned to Hungary, she decided to train as a photographer at the School of Photojournalism in Budapest. She came to the UK in 1972 and enrolled at the Central London Polytechnic where she was able to explore creative photographic processes, and since then her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Serpentine Gallery, the Photographers’ Gallery and the Cambridge Darkroom. A retrospective of her work was held at the National Museum of Photography, Film and TV in Bradford in 1994.
Access
- The galleries, where exhibitions are shown, and all areas of the Clore Learning Studio (level -1), the Research Space (level 1) and the Ede Room (level 2) are fully accessible.
- We have wheelchair accessible toilets on the lower ground (level -1), ground and first floor (level 1).
- There is a lift giving access to all floors located past the galleries, just beside the Clore Learning Studio on the ground floor.
- Kettle’s Yard welcomes assistance and service dogs in all areas.
- We have large-print versions of the wall text available.
- We can lend visitors small folding seats for taking around exhibitions or using at non-seated events. Please ask a Visitor Assistant for help finding a seat.