Sanna Leone

Sanna Leone engages with myths about human self-understanding and their immanence. In her installation assemblages, the given space is restaged and reinterpreted. Through the interlocking of physical dimension, movement, and materiality, a kind of spatial vocabulary emerges, ambivalent in its interpretation.

Increasingly, she also works with written language as an artistic medium. Her recently published Master’s thesis “the paradox of human existence as a deficiency being” examines vanitas themes from the late Middle Ages and the figure of the fool as distinctly contemporary motifs. Her work explores how ideas and social structures are never truly overcome but instead return cyclically in transformed forms. Against the notion of linear progress, she proposes a spiral movement of recurrence and transformation.

Sanna studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. For nearly a decade she worked as a social worker and now mainly works as metal worker and welding instructor for Flinta*. She currently holds a residency in the artist house Vorwerkstift in Hamburg and is part of the team of galerie21. She recently completed her Master of Fine Arts under Kader Attia, Sung Tieu, and Dr. Hanne Loreck. Her works have been nominated for the Hiscox Prize and shown in various European countries, including Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, and the UK.