Kirsten Leenaars

Exhibitions: Leenaars' work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues including The Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; Kamloops Gallery, Kamloops, MAI, Montreal; The Broad MSU Museum of Art, East Lansing; The Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; The District of Columbia Arts Center, Washington DC; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Glass Curtain Gallery, Threewalls, Gallery 400, and 6018North, Chicago; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Detroit; Printed Matter, Inc., New York; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Grants: Leenaars most recently received the Artist Response Grant from DCASE Chicago and has received multiple grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation; The Mondrian Fund; cultural support grants from the Dutch Consulate in New York, Milwaukee Art Board Production Grant and Fonds BKVB. Awards: Leenaars has been nominated for the USA Fellowship multiple times and the 3Arts Award and received an Envisioning Justice Award from Illinois Humanities. She currently is a Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices and the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kirsten Leenaars (NL) is an interdisciplinary video artist based in Chicago. Various forms of performance, theater, and documentary strategies make up the threads that run through her work. She engages with individuals and communities to create participatory video and performance work. Her work oscillates between fiction and documentation, reinterprets personal stories and reimagines everyday realities through shared authorship, staging and improvisation. Leenaars examines through her work how we relate to others and explores how through the production of the work itself new forms of relating can be created. Recent projects include The Broadcast (2019), a video project for the Broad Museum in East Lansing considering truth and distortion in public address and media representations; Present Tense (2019), a multichannel video work, commissioned by Illinois Humanities, in which young men and women reflect on their lived effects of the current justice system and prison-industrial complex. (Re)Housing the American Dream (2015-ongoing), a multi-year performative documentary project with American born and refugee youth commissioned by the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee.

Present Tense, 2019, 3-channel video. The video Present Tense is collectively made with young members of the Circles & Ciphers community. This music video is inspired by Circles & Ciphers’ hip-hop infused restorative justice practice and their collective creative talent. Personal stories and communal experiences are woven together in this video to express the performers’ individuality whilst being part of a collective. Leenaars made props from cardboard which the performers interacted with. The graffiti text objects represent some of the core values Circles&Ciphers strives for: freedom, justice, community, healing, expression. The performers in the video enact a freestyle cipher and additionally perform individual freestyle raps about their own lived experiences in response to the prompt that they were given: freedom. The video shoot itself was organized as a multi-day community event in which members of Circles & Ciphers partook in the creation of the music video as authors and performers, fostering community and providing the viewer with multiple points of connection, raising awareness about the lived effects of the current justice system and prison-industrial complex.

(Re)Housing the American Dream: Freedom Principles, 2018, 3-channel video. (Re)Housing the American Dream is an ongoing community-based performative documentary project that explores the role of film as political action. (Re)Housing the American Dream: Freedom Principles explores the historical, cultural and personal notions of freedom through performative actions that have been developed collectively during a one-week intensive film production. The group spent a significant amount of their time exploring the roots to various freedom struggles in Milwaukee, specifically looking to the speech and actions of the youth chapter of the NAACP, who were instrumental in leading a number of civil rights protests in the city in the 1960s. Together, the artist and participants moved throughout the city, visiting the different historical sites where important civil rights actions took place. Marking, building, commemorating, (re)claiming, imagining, occupying, embodying, framing, performing, transmitting many facetted ways freedom can take form.