ARTIST’S TALK with KIRSTEN LEENAARS
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25
12:00 pm (PDT)
All ages, FREE
Join us on Zoom for a virtual screening of Kirsten Leenaars’ work (Re)Housing the American Dream: Freedom Principles (2018) followed by an artist’s talk, “(Re)Housing the American Dream and the Politics of Imagination.”
Who gets to imagine what? The act of imagining itself is not a fair, objective, or equitable thing. So what happens when you follow the same group of twenty-two American born and refugee youth over a period of years and ask them collectively to imagine different future scenarios, reframe-histories, and contextualize their own lived experiences and truth? Kirsten Leenaars’ (Re)Housing the American Dream: Freedom Principles is part of an ongoing community-based performative documentary project, set in the city of Milwaukee, that explores the role of film as political action, and examines the politics of imagination through the act of collective making.
Kirsten Leenaars is an interdisciplinary video artist based in Chicago. Various forms of performance, theater, and documentary strategies make up the threads that run through her work. She 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 shared authorship, staging and improvisation. Through her work, Leenaars examines how we relate to others and explores how through the production of the work itself new forms of relating can be created.
Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, at venues including the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; MAI, Montreal; the District of Columbia Arts Center, Washington DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Art Institute of Chicago, The Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; 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. Leenaars has received multiple grants from the Any Warhol Foundation; The Mondrian Fund; cultural support grants from the Dutch Consulate in New York, Milwaukee Art Board Production Grant and Fonds BKVB. Leenaars has been nominated for the 3Arts Award and the USA Fellowship and received an Envisioning Justice Award from Illinois Humanities. She currently is an Associate Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices and the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
