COGNITION AND RECOGNITION
Cognition and Recognition is one of the chapters of the research on How Art Comes Alive.
We recognize a body before we understand it. Skin, an organ, a scar, the length of a limb: the eye identifies the familiar surface long before anything is felt. This research begins at that first, almost clinical moment of recognition, and asks what happens next.
The works borrow the language of science, of anatomy, measurement and the medical record, to build forms that are clearly not alive, yet close enough to life to be answered. A scar that belongs to no one. An organ without a function. A figure with the dimensions of a body, but no body. The viewer recognizes the outer layer and, without deciding to, begins to care: to wince at a wound that cannot hurt, to find company in something that cannot return it.
No doctor will ever find a pulse in these works. The empathy they receive can never be reciprocated, and that is where this research lies: in why we keep offering it anyway. Recognition is not the end of looking but the start of an exchange, a breath in and a breath out, between a living spectator and a form that only lives through them.
Two-person exhibition with Nathalia Koux, Rufa Space, Rome, October 2024
An exhibition by Janneke Leenders and Nathalia Koux, searching for life where it is least expected: in death, in memory, in nature. Brain scans lit from behind, testimonies on canvas and a house clipped to a grid like a cell in a body give lifeless forms a history, until the viewer begins to read them as someone.
Galleria Gilda Lavia, Rome · 29 September – 30 November 2023
With Francesco Andreozzi and Oriente Plazzi Marzotto
Just Sleeping brings together three artists around one state we all pass through every night and never see: sleep. Each work moves along the border between waking and unconsciousness, where the body stays behind while the mind drifts off.
Janneke Leenders's part of the exhibition is about the alienation and detachment of the sleeping body. A sleeping body is present and absent at once: it is still there, but no longer lived in. In the video installation You Are Not Dead You Are Just Sleeping, and in Dissolved, Digested and Feign, the body turns into something seen from outside, close to disappearing.
Prints that record the growth of an imagined scar, stage by stage, like a medical file for an organism that doesn't exist. Pain belongs only to the living, yet these scars ask to be felt.
Etching, aquatint, drypoint, lithography and monotype, 2023–2024