Zoe Leonard was born in a Liberty, a small town in upstate New York, in 1961and has been based in New York City for most of her life. Rigorously conceptual, Leonard's work combines photography, sculpture and site-specific installation. Her photography consider the conventions of contemporary photographic culture, or the ordering of vision the medium enables.
Reoccuring thematic investments include the urban landscape, grief and mourning specifically in the context of the AIDS epidemic, and the mutaliation of the natural world by human activity. Her practice moves between text installations, such the infamous poem and queer manifesto "I want a president", and recent projects focused on photography's complicity with territorial expansion and the construction of nationalist narratives in the United States and elsewhere. Leonard explains, "I am considering how photography can chart a new path of counter-narratives and liberatory gestures of un-building, re-thinking, and re-making how we see and engage with land, history, and each other." *
Leonard was a member of ACT UP and the Women's Action Coalition, and participated actively in AIDS advocacy and queer political movements in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. She is a founding member of the queer artist collective fierce pussy, founded in 1991. Leonard has exhibited widely since the early 1990s, including Documenta IX and Documenta XII, as well as the Whitney biennials in 1993,1997 and 2014. Her work was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2018. She presented her landmark decade-long photography project Analogue in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museo Reina Sofia in 2015. Other solo presentations have been organized by the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, Kunsthalle Basel, and Vienna Secession.
* cooper.edu/academics/people/zoe-leonard
Price: 80 Sek (free admission for students)
Tickets: Link will be published when Mötesplats Mariatorget have tickets ready
World in My Eyes – An Artist Lecture Series
All the islands in the ocean
All the heavens in the motion
Let me show you the world in my eyes
// Depeche Mode (1990)
In its third season, the artist talk series World in My Eyes presents Ibrahim Mahama, Aki Sasamoto and Zoe Leonard. Each artist contributes to both the discursive and formal hybridity of contemporary art at a moment of acute geopolitical volatility and increasing polarization.
Launched in 2023, World in My Eyes is an artist lecture series in Stockholm presented through a collaboration between Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design; Moderna Museet; and the Royal Institute of Art and hosted by Mötesplats Mariatorget. Its title drawn from the eponymous 1990s electronic music hit by English band Depeche Mode, the series aims to present artistic perspectives from a wide range of media that are changing the relationship between material processes and socio-political imagination.