Zoe Leonard

Corner House, Chora, Anafi, 2024
Lens and darkened room

Conversation between Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenzo and Zoe Leonard following the screening of Boudry / Lorenz’s Moving Backwards (HD video, 23 min., 2019)

Poster, Bus stop project

Zoe Leonard is an American artist working with photography, sculpture and site-specific installation. By employing strategies of repetition, shifting perspectives, and a multitude of printing processes, Leonard’s practice probes the politics of representation and display. Leonard’s work encourages the viewer to reconsider the act of looking itself, drawing attention to observation as a complex, ongoing process.

For phenomenon 5, Leonard turned the room of an old house into a camera obscura, projecting the outdoor view inverted on the walls of the room. Corner House, Chora, Anafi is the most recent work in a series of camera obscura installations that Leonard has created in different sites over a number of years. These include St. Apern Straße 26 in Köln (2011); Arkwright Road at Camden Art Centre in London (2012); Campo San Samuele, 3231 in Venice (2012); 453 West 17th Street in New York City, (2012); 100 North Nevill Street at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa (2013-2015) and 945 Madison Avenue at the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York.

Alongside other artists, Zoe Leonard also read one of the letters relating to the themes of Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’ Moving Backwards (2019) and took part in a conversation with the two artists following the screening of their video work at the Port next to Cafe Florans. Starting from the works they presented within the framework of phenomenon 5, they discussed, among other things, the notions of inverted space and time and how these can allow us to re-imagine the present and the future otherwise.