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

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.