Juliana Cerqueira Leite

In practice: another ecHo, january 29- APril 2 2018, Sculpture center, new york

In practice: another ecHo, january 29- APril 2 2018, Sculpture center, new york

“ Juliana Cerqueira Leite looks to the media, specifically the physical gestures of reporters and civilians sharing their experiences of geopolitical and humanitarian crises. Leite focuses on moments when individuals attempt to communicate or reenact their experiences of events that are beyond their agency, echoing them through the movements of her own body. Moving her arms and hands within a deep crate filled with wet clay, she produces a gestural void that becomes a mold for casting surreal sculptures that express the shortcomings of language and the shared weight of trauma. Though Leite does not claim to know the experiences of her subjects, she literally reenacts their positions to humanize events the media so often sensationalizes and to reveal the intimate politics of physically occupying space. Leite covers stories of a little boy in Yemen with burns, immigrants standing up to neo-Nazis in Greece, the arrest of gay and trans people in Lebanon, poverty in Baltimore, and more. Language returns to the sculptures in their titling, fragmented yet indexical to the conditions she enacts: The first problem we had was reporting . . . they ridiculed and belittled . . . a mindset that does not see it as a crime . . . the movement of the earth actually lifted the house . . . back to school after I’ve earned more money . . . part of a struggle that my father,my grandfather, my people overcame in 1988.”

Allie Tepper, Sculpture Center 2018 Curatorial Fellow