Janneke Leenders' work explores HOW ART COMES ALIVE: how something material, and therefore lifeless, can be perceived as alive.

The Shared Visual — Sleep and memory are her main frameworks. Dreams and memories exist in one mind only, but through storytelling and staged scenes the artwork turns them into a shared visual in which someone else can recognize them as their own.

Cognition and Recognition — A more factual approach, drawing on what we know about living things. Borrowing the language of science, such as anatomy, measurement and the medical record, she builds forms that are clearly not alive, yet close enough to life to be recognized and cared for.

Light Encounters — Through light, she makes space come alive. Light has no body, yet it takes up space; projected at the scale of architecture, an image becomes a presence. Nothing in the room is alive, and still we move with it. The viewer doesn't look at the work but walks into it, and the encounter happens between the light, the space and the body that enters it.