Laura Leppert at Konsumverein / Braunschweig

Laura Leppert / Isn't it nice when things just work?

April 21 – May 22 2022

Konsumverein, Braunschweig, Germany




















Photography: Laura Leppert / copyright the artist

 

 

 

Vimeo links:

 

How Long Is Now https://vimeo.com/540098822

 

Unspecial Effects  https://vimeo.com/662304496/d5135650d6

 

Possession (The Vessel Breaks) https://vimeo.com/701606334/0f0cef6e75

 

 

 

Laura Leppert (b.1993) is an artist currently based between Berlin and Munich. Her multidisciplinary practice meanders between video, installation, text, sculpture and sound.

She is interested in the materiality of storytelling, exploring tropes that are tools and traps at the same time.

For Konsumverein, Laura Leppert develops a new installation combining moving image and sculptural work. In the darkened space, the video works provide a nervous, ever-changing lighting for Agreement, an installation comprised of waterjet-cut stainless steel objects hanging on the walls, and porously spreading out on the floor via numerous cutouts. Tool-like shapes, crude coin facsimiles and cutout imprints of bodyparts mix with laser-engraved leather rags.

In the main video work Possession (The vessel breaks) (2021/22), everything is put to work - people, machines, plants, the soil, the cloud - but the script they follow is often opaque or imposed. The myth of „cheap nature“ working for free is the basis for value creation in our society. The third industrial revolution in the course of automation is already visible on the horizon. What if all these things, infrastructures and signifiers were to stop working in a revolt of refusal?

            In How Long Is Now (2020), a woman is stuck in a time loop. Every time she dies in a slapstick accident in her tiny home, she is sent back to the start again and respawns. The longer the time loop lasts, the harder it gets to hold onto supporting structures and routines, sabotaged by respawns, saving points like in video games, flashbacks, hangovers and lags. This smooth artificial landscape was built on top of rubble and gigantic human errors. How to build a livable present while you‘re stuck in virtual limbo? How Long Is Now meditates on isolation, the nature of routines and thought patterns, the well-trodden paths of timetravel plots, and if you‘re indeed hurting continuity while killing time.

            Using the artificial landscapes of two botanical gardens located in Germany and Portugal, the video work Unspecial Effects (2022) reflects on the narrative of catastrophe, its cinematic effects, and (neo-)colonial logics at its foundation. The glass cathedral towers over a perfectly ordered landscape. Everything is arranged, labeled, obsessively categorized - collaged together over thousands of miles by people who took the world as their sandbox. By superimposing cheap cinematic overlays like meteor showers, explosions and falling debris onto the footage, the signifiers of mainstream spectacle come raining down over those necroaesthetic building-vitrines displaying the remnants and bystanders of a very real apocalypse.


Laura Leppert studied Sculpture and Transmedial Space in Kiel, Linz and Munich, with Olaf Nicolai, Cécile B. Evans, Simon Starling, Florian Hüttner and Eva Grubinger, among others.She participated in CSAV Artist's Laboratory at Fondazione Ratti, Como, IT, and was artist in residence at KAIR Kosice, SVK. She is a fellow of the Study Foundation of the German People and received the scholarship for visual arts by Stiftung Kunstfonds. She was awarded the Scholarship for Visual Arts of the City of Munich, and a Graduation Prize for her diploma work. In 2021 she was artist in residence at Urbane Künste Ruhr in Dortmund.