Born in 1981, Juliana Cerqueira Leite lives and works in Brooklyn. Her practice brings together sculpture, drawing, movement, film, and photography, while producing works that are deeply rooted in materiality.

The artist frequently challenges existing hierarchies between mind and matter, working directly with her own body as an active material and a generator of meaning. Cerqueira Leite explores the poetics of bodies navigating through time and space.

During her residency at Atelier Calder, Juliana Cerqueira Leite produced a body of new works composed of drawings and sculptures, allowing her to further develop her relationship to movement, abstraction, and the history of modernity.
In the first month of her residency, she began a new production presented during the AR(t]CHIPEL Festival, based on a 16 mm film titled Labor, made in 2024 prior to her residency.

This film extends the artist’s research into the ways repetitive gestures shape, deconstruct, and transform the world built by humans. Four assembly-line workers reenact, from memory, the movements that structured their working lives.
This project continues a research process initiated in 2023, drawing on the archives compiled by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, held at Purdue University. The Gilbreths’ approach consisted of studying repetitive movements on industrial production lines, capturing them through photography and film.

Through the use of long-exposure photography and pioneering techniques developed in the early twentieth century by Lillian and Frank Gilbreth, Labor establishes a dialogue between the emergence of cinema and photography and the mechanization of industrial labor based on repetition and tempo.
Accompanied by an original soundtrack composed by Nik Colk Void, the film explores correspondences between matter, memory, and labor, shifting from animation to live-action footage in the same way one moves from gesture to recollection.

Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s artistic process unfolds over a long period of time, punctuated by successive stages that lead from an everyday gesture to an abstract sculptural work. Each stage of creation, each element, is made by the artist herself.
Like a living organism, the work continually evolves during its making, moving from the figurative image in the film Labor to metal sculpture, gradually covered with material, as the artist distances herself from figuration as well as from the theme of repetitive gestures associated with industrial production.

By exploring biomorphic forms—ovoid masses, curved and supple lines, stylized volumes—her sculptures play between matter and void, just as in music, sounds and silences contribute to the rhythm of a composition.

At every stage of her work, Juliana Cerqueira Leite allows us to glimpse forms in the process of becoming: concave or convex, rounded and sensual, they take shape through undulating, fluid lines.
With this project, Juliana Cerqueira Leite seeks to make us aware of the ways in which past ideals influence our understanding of the present and our embodied experience.

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More information:
https://www.julianacerqueiraleite.com/

Work in Progress - Photos: Guillaume Blanc