Kirsten Leenaars www.kirstenleenaars.nl
Kirsten Leenaars (1976, Netherlands) moved to Chicago 2 years ago to join the Masters program at UIC. She graduated last May and received her MFA in Studio Arts. Prior to that she studied arts in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Her practice is driven by her endless fascination for people. She is a collector of personal stories and uses these to pose questions in her work about longing and belonging. In her photo, video and installation work she creates imaginary worlds based on these personal stories.
She stages portraits - of herself as well as of friends and members of a given community that address both private and cultural desires, projections and fears. Through these portrayals I bring my subjects’ interior worlds out into the social sphere where they are offered as alternatives to the drab, ready-made reality that threatens to streamline subjective hope and desire. As such they can be described as acts of resistance. Through the imaginary she aims to re-contextualize notions of identity and place and explore how imagination shapes the way we relate to each other and shapes the way we relate to the world we live in.
Kirsten Leenaars has lived and exhibited at various galleries in Berlin, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, New York, Barcelona, Tbilisi and Chicago and her videos were screened at multiple festivals. She is also active as a writer and editor for various Dutch and
American publications. She will start teaching at the Art Institute in Chicago in Fall 2008.
EPISODES©2008