Leah Gordon

View works. Leah Gordon, ‘Burryman’, 2010
Leah Gordon, ‘Burryman’, 2010
View works

Leah Gordon (born Ellesmere Port, UK) is an artist, curator, and writer. Her work explores the intervolved and intersectional histories of the Caribbean plantation system, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Enclosure Acts and the creation of the British working-class. In the 1980's she wrote lyrics, sang, and played for a feminist folk punk band. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Dak’art Biennale; the National Portrait Gallery, UK and the Norton Museum of Art, Florida. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; was a curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale; was the co-curator of ‘Kafou: Haiti, History & Art’ at Nottingham Contemporary, UK; and was the co-curator of 'PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince' at Pioneer Works, NYC in 2018 and MOCA, Miami in 2019. In 2022 she exhibited and curated at documenta fifteen, Kassel, exhibited at MOCA North Miami and the Power Plant Gallery, Duke University, NC, USA.

 

 

Artist statement:
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - I turn to Marx as a poet, rather than an economist, to give me any hope for the past. The turbulences of the epochal capitalist accumulations of the 18th and 19th centuries help me to gather an internationalist understanding of where we find ourselves in the 21st century. I feel we suspected the Modern as a slick mediator of capitalist expansion far too late. Modernism's relation to architecture; the intervolved histories of the slave trade, the enclosures, and the industrial revolution; grassroots religious, class and folk histories; and the proliferation of informal economies ground me. I scour back through time to unearth quasi-utopic pasts and depend on proxy histories from pre-grain societies, esoteric rituals, alchemical processes, collective bargaining and revolutionary narratives to garner scraps of salvation. I see no futures only the past. Haiti is my sole speculative.