Juliana Cerqueira Leite

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

I am interested in the poetics of human bodies navigating imposed limits. I consider myself a sculptor, and I am a physical material within my work, including my body in an attempt to question hierarchies between mind and body, nature and culture. In preparation for making sculptures I frequently employ drawing, movement, video, archival research and photography. My work explores a territory between the phenomenological and representational approaches to figuration. This means resisting symbolism, narrative, and formalism, while insisting on the figure’s potential. I find that Eurocentric and conventional ways of representing human beings are no longer able to negotiate aspects of our contemporary conditions of existence. Late capitalism, environmental crises, the harms of racism, and biological essentialism are resisted by a changing landscape of symbiotic and hybridized bodies that demand new forms. This changeable nature of a body is - like sculpture - defined in the negative: in relation to what it is not. In my work I engage the history of figurative representation while aiming to explore the human subject oscillating between times, states and identities. I aim to question the thinking that directs representations of the body in visual art, and instead generate indexical presentations of my body informed by tactility, action and interiority. I work from specific, choregraphed action-schemes and repetitive movements. I often work from the inside out, capturing motion...

Artwork