Miriam Laura Leonardi

Snow'n'Rail (Artist)

4K video, 50'', loop, 2019

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Miriam Laura Leonardi’s Snow’n’Rail (Artist) is a multi-tiered work. At first glance, this filmed performance seems to take a humorous interest in the issues of transport and mobility. Indeed, the work presents a typical ski slope, somewhere in Switzerland, which the artist descends in a bag on the snow. The slide and its childlike fun become a means of transport. However, one can also interpret this short film as a criticism, however mild, of the art market and consumerism: the artist moves around in a bag that seems to belong to a fictitious gallery and stages herself as a valuable object. Moreover, she uses this bag to move around, just as the artist uses the art market as a means of circulation and evolution. The boundary between the work produced and the artist becomes blurred, all the more so as the runway has neither beginning nor end, an infinite loop blending in with the daily movement of the users of the Léman Express.

Produced by the Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain, Geneva.

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Miriam Laura Leonardi was born in 1985 in Lörrach, Germany. She lives and works in Zurich. From 2007 to 2009, she studied photography at the Ecole des Gobelins in Paris, before completing her training at the ZHDK in 2015. Her work was encouraged by a travel grant from the Atelier Mondial in 2015, and in 2017 she won the competition of the Istituto Svizzero in Rome to work as an artist-in-residence. In 2019, supported by Pro Helvetia, she travelled to London to work with the Gasworks organisation. She also won a Kadist Kunsthalle Zürich Production Award in 2015, and a Swiss Art Award in 2017. Her work was selected in several competitions, including the Swiss Art Awards in 2016 and 2019, the Battaglia Foundry Sculpture Prize, and the Prix d’art intégré de Nyon in 2017. In addition to her artistic projects, Miriam Laura Leonardi has also worked with Ben Rosenthal for ADAR in Zurich in 2016, and Beauty and Room in Sion in 2017.

Miriam Laura Leonardi’s work revolves around language: she questions signs, their meaning and how we perceive them. She is interested in the information transmitted, the message and its limitations. Translation is also important in her work, as an agent of cultural transmission; she has herself translated books from French into German. Her main areas of work are sculpture, video performance, and installations.