KIRSTEN LEENAARS

2020

Oct 2

(Re)Housing the American Dream: Freedom Principles, 2018
3-channel video
15:17
Director/Editor: Kirsten Leenaars
Assistant Director: Lindsey Barlag-Thornton
Camera: Ellie Hall and Orlando Pinder
Sound: Jimmy Schauss
Production Assistants: Li Ming Hu and Zachary Hutchinson
Composer: Paul Deuth
Performers: Isa Ali Ahmad, Nur Ali Ahmad, Yusof Ali Ahmad, Rokimah Ali Ahmad, Alanis Aranda-Salgado, Javon Amin Barker, Elsa Grace Berner, Paw Htoo Boe, Iman Fatmi, Nina Jackson, Vittoria Patricia Lucchesi, Amina Mohamed, Rahma Mohamed, Malechi Moore, Matthew Moore, Grace Elaine Ohlendorf, Ju Hta Paw, Hannah Plevin, Paw Boe Say, and Naw Tha Da

RIVERSIDE PARK

Re(Housing) the American Dream is a documentary project by Kirsten Leenaars and a group of young students from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with whom the artist has collaborated since 2016. Freedom Principles, the third video from this ongoing project, was inspired by the city’s civil rights movement, including the contributions of the youth chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) during the 1960s. This vibrant video features the youth engaged in a series of collectively performed gestures—skipping, secret handshakes, call-and-response cries, tug-of-war and clapping games. These outdoor vignettes are interspersed with broadcasts from the utopian Radio Freedom, an imagined radio station. Framed by colourful sets built from cardboard, construction paper and masking tape, Leenaars’ young collaborators discuss such pressing political issues as the migrant experience, abortion rights and the necessity of voting.

Kirsten Leenaars is an experimental documentary maker and 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 staging, improvisation and iteration. In her work, she aims to bring to light a shared humanity, often through humor and play. Recent projects include (Re)Housing the American Dream—a multi-year performative documentary project with American-born and refugee youth commissioned by the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee, and Notes on Empty Chairs, a series of three performances about loss, community, and empathy, produced for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in response to the work of Doris Salcedo.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, at venues including the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico; the District of Columbia Arts Center, Washington DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; Glass Curtain Gallery, Threewalls, Gallery 400, and 6018North, Chicago; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Detroit, Michigan; Printed Matter, Inc., New York; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany. Leenaars has received multiple grants from the Any Warhol Foundation; The Mondrian Fund; cultural support grants from the Dutch Consulate in New York, and Milwaukee Art Board Production Grant. Leenaars has been nominated for the 3Arts Award, multiple times and most recently was nominated for the USA Fellowship. Currently, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices and the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

kirstenleenaars.com
@kirsten_leenaars