Leonie Kellein

Leonie Kellein

Leonie Kellein works primarily with moving image. Her practice centres on the investigation of the filmic gaze and sets the poetics, politics and history of camera images in relation to the body’s sensory feedback.

Leonie Kellein (b. 1993) works primarily with moving image. Her practice centres on the investigation of the filmic gaze and technique in a process of layering that employs narrative structures and forms while drawing attention to the media themselves. Her work - spanning film, sculpture and installation in space - often unfolds between different media and their related materialities. In Kellein's work, moments of disturbance and suspense, omission and repetition, as well as the use of placeholders and non-human bodies are deployed with intentional ambiguity to create a kind of splitting of real time into a double state. This double state is viewed by Kellein first and foremost as political instrument that sets the poetics, politics and violent history of camera images in relation to the body’s sensory feedback.

Leonie Kellein holds an MA Artists’ Film and Moving Image degree from Goldsmiths, University of London, as a DAAD scholarship holder, as well as a BA in Fine Art from the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg. She has received numerous scholarships and prizes, including the Hamburg Work Scholarship, the MAK Schindler Scholarship (Shortlist) and the Advancement Award of the Arthur Boskamp Foundation. Her films have been screened at International Filmfestival Visions du Réel, Nyon and at the International Filmfestival FID Marseille, amongst others.

A Wing Beat! A Wing Beat!

HD Video / 07:00 min / 2022

04:34 min excerpt

The multimedia installation A Wing Beat! A Wing Beat! follows the perspective of a pigeon reproduced by a drone- mounted camera. In referencing aesthetics of earlier homing pigeon photography, whose analog technology drone- mounted cameras replace, the work incorporates various media dispositions: parts of the video are recordings from a camera secured to the body of the pigeon and transported by it. As footage of the area surrounding Hohenlockstedt - a region that served military purposes during the imperial and national socialist regimes - plays in the video, the spatial installation focuses on the body of the pigeon itself, and attempts to control and capture it.

Stupor

HD Video / 16:00 min / 2024

02:02 min excerpt

In the short film Stupor, a traumatizing attack, recounted by a voice off-screen, is anticipated and thereby narrowly averted. The film is set in a dark, eerie ice rink where several people come into view via slow-motion camera movements. Video and audio seem to run on separate tracks, their synthesis engendering strange hal- lucinatory effects in the viewer’s mind. Any attempt at solidifying presumptions—casting a specific body in the role of the victim or the perpetrator— are undermined, become fluid, and congeal only momentarily. Ultimate- ly, the mounting suspense of the narrative is disappointed and the figures become legible simply as bodies that, for the moment, inhabit the same time and space.