Kirsten Leenaars

Education: Kirsten Leenaars (NL) received her BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Exhibitions: Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues including Eye Film Museum, Amsterdam; 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: She received numerous grants amongst others: Cultural Contribution Grant, Dutch Consulate NY, USA; DCASE Artist Response Grant ($100,000); Cultural Support Grant, Dutch Embassy, USA; Envisioning Justice action grant, Illinois Humanities; Milwaukee Art Board Production Grant; DCASE iIndividual Artist Grant; Andy Warhol Foundation Arts grant. 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 (she/her) (NL) is an interdisciplinary video artist based in Chicago and works at the intersection of documentary and social practice. She engages with individuals and communities to create collaborative video work examining the way our collective imagination and dominant media narratives shape our lived realities. Collaboration is a key part of Leenaars’ creative process. She believes that the questions behind the work are most critically activated through shared and collaborative processes that allow for a multitude of voices and experiences. It also spurs her, as an artist––especially working with youth––to think about the politics of imagination: who gets to imagine what?

In order to delve into complex and often messy ideas and definitions of identity, place, community, and belonging, she invites participants into long standing communal experiences during which they develop the video work and through which her subjects can participate in their own representation and tell their own stories.

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.