Zoe Leonard: In the Wake
Beginning 13 September, Hauser & Wirth presents “In the Wake”, its first exhibition with New York based Zoe Leonard. The artist’s distinctive merging of photography, sculpture, and installation will unfold over three floors of the gallery’s townhouse, debuting three new bodies of work that balance the rigorous conceptualism and personal vision for which she has achieved critical recognition. On view through 22 October, the photographs and sculptures in the exhibition probe the generational impact of displacement and what Leonard has described as ‘statelessness as both an individual experience and a shared social condition.’
Using old snapshots of Leonard’s family from the years after World War II as her starting point, Leonard examines the ripple effects of war that reverberate across generations. Her mother’s family was from Warsaw and remained there during World War II as active participants in the Polish Resistance Movement. At the end of the war, with Poland under Soviet occupation, Leonard’s grandmother – and her mother, still a child – escaped the country and reunited with her great aunt in a Displaced Persons camp in Italy. They remained stateless for over a decade before eventually immigrating to the United States and obtaining citizenship.
With the work on view at Hauser & Wirth, Leonard draws a connection between the social upheaval of the postwar years and the rise of photography as a popular medium. The family snapshot can be understood as a form of self-representation and a mode of describing and sharing lived experience, an alternative to official representations of history. Leonard photographs these snapshots not only as images, but as objects – paper curled, surfaces shiny, and edges scalloped, cracked, or cut – in a way that pushes imagery to the edge of legibility and calls into question the idea of faithful reproduction or representation.
By utilizing a wide variety of cameras, formats, and printing processes, Leonard creates a visual language that is erratic, stuttered, and dispersed. For example, in ‘Misia, postwar’ (2016), surface glare renders the central subject of the original snapshot illegible, while drawing attention to the imprint of a postmark. “It’s not that one sees less here,” Leonard explains, “but that different information becomes visible.” Through this highly subjective process, which Leonard describes as “the opposite of archiving,” she questions how historical narratives are produced. There is a story here; but Leonard’s work communicates more than the fact of displacement, expressing an alienated state of mind that is passed down.
