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Juliana Cerqueira Leite (born 1981, Chicago, USA) is a Brazilian artist currently living and working in New York, USA. Cerqueira Leite graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art MFA Sculpture program in 2006 (London) as recipient of the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize. Cerqueira Leite primarily works in sculpture, including site-specific pieces, photography and video. In 2017 Cerqueira Leite was invited to participate in the inaugural Antarctic Biennale. In 2016 She was awarded the Furla Art Prize for her contribution to the 5th Moscow Young Art Biennale. She has exhibited her work internationally in solo and group shows in venues including the Saatchi Gallery in London, Lendi Projects in Switzerland, Marres House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, Galeria Casa Triangulo in São Paulo, Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome, TJ Boulting in London, DUVE in Berlin, and Anthology Film Archives in New York. She was one of eight artists chosen to represent Brazil in the 2014 Vancouver Biennial and has recently exhibited a monumental commission for Lustwarande 2015 in Tilburg, Holland. Juliana Cerqueira Leite has been working with the human body, specifically her body, as both material and generator of meaning.in her art for the majority of her career. [cite: http://www.artnews.com/2016/09/15/tricky-territory-in-a-new-book-juliana-cerqueira-leite-looks-at-how-best-to-represent-the-vagina/]. Her work is driven by an investigation into physicality and how we interact with the physical world and the intimate politics of the body taking up space. Interacting with mnemonic materials – plaster, clay and rubber – to capture movements as form, she aims to question agency and individuality by probing the ideologies that define a body’s boundaries and ability to generate significance through action.

Her work engages with the history of figurative sculpture while aiming to explore destabilized and pluralistic forms for representing the contemporary body. Capturing movement within large clay-filled molds, holding plaster against her skin, or casting an inner hollow of her body she utilizes the materials and produces negatives, to reveal absences and makes visible points of contact and ‘in betweens’ as sites of meaning. Here subjective agency becomes confused: the environment and objects suggest acts that culture defines as her own. This symbiosis with objects, environment, and confusion of the subject’s boundaries destabilizes the metabolizing of experiences as inner or outer. Both in photography and sculpture Cerqueira Leite’s work renders relations as they unfold in time, aiming to produce new form.

“Her work shows a struggle between narrative and context that addresses universal human conditions through the undeniably corporeal dimension to her work. Her sculptures reconcile the "practice" of art making with the bodies of its creator and spectators, portraying the contingency of means and end, input and output.

Monumental or delicately proportioned her works investigate how time and physical action are captured by matter to generate form. Her practice reveals a phenomenological approach to process by mapping the experience of embodiment, how it is portrayed through figurative representation and the history of sculpture.”