Breaching the Contract: Breaking Free from the Emotional and Ideological Prison of Renaissance Masterpieces | PhD, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London, 2019, Leni Dothan - Link to Contract
Contract 001 - Performance Lecture, Birth Rites Collection, Canterbury, UK, 22.7.2024
Contract 002 - As part of ‘Subversive Bodies’ curated by Dyana Gravina, Hypha Studios, Stratford, London, 20.10.2024
For me, art is a tool for creating and breaching contracts – social, economic, and political. The prism through which I operate as a researcher, architect, and artist is the contract. I seek to uncover the forces of regulation concealed beneath beauty and challenge them with new narratives. My work often returns to the Renaissance, where I identified what I call “visual contracts” shaping women’s roles through iconic religious imagery, particularly the Madonna and Child and the Pietà. These depictions form contracts not through words, but through color, gesture, and composition, embedding women within national and theological ideologies they had no part in writing.
In my practice, I construct new images and structures of motherhood. These often take the form of life-sized wooden structures and performances with my son, filmed as intimate explorations of love, dependence, and resistance. My recent works turn contracts into text-based performances, reimagining the economic and emotional agreements between artist, viewer, and artwork. These contracts transform passive spectators into active participants, sometimes physically inscribed on me through photographic documentation. In this way, I build new social agreements, relational, intimate, and transformative.