Leonie Kellein (b. 1993 in Basel, Switzerland) works across moving image, sculpture and installation to explore how perception is shaped, and at times unsettled, by the technologies that frame it. Her practice examines the tension between bodily awareness and mechanical recording, creating moments where seeing becomes an embodied and uncertain act. Through this focus on the filmic gaze, she investigates how acts of looking reveal the politics and material operations of the image itself. Her current research focuses in particular on the disciplining of bodies in the service of media or military technologies—for example, the bodies of former soldiers or carrier pigeons.

Most recently, for her work →A Wing Beat! A Wing Beat! (2022), she worked with footage from a camera that was attached to the body of a pigeon and carried by it. She transformed the resulting video installation into the medium of a book, realizing it as an →artist’s book (2024) that engages with the history of carrier pigeon photography. The publication combines historical photographs, images of sculptural objects and drone imagery of the Hohenlockstedt area — a region in Schleswig- Holstein, Germany, that was used for military training during the German Empire and the Nazi era.

Recent group exhibitions include In the air at Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg (2026); Swiss Art Awards at Art Basel, Basel (2025); After the Afternoon at Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2025); Don’t try to find me at Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg (2025); Artist talks at Goldsmiths University of London, London (2025), Prize NORDWESTKUNST at Kunsthalle Wilhelmshafen, Wilhelmshaven (2025), In with the New at the Falckenberg Collection of the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg (2024) and I only work with lost and found at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin (2024).

Kellein holds an MA Artists’ Film and Moving Image degree from Goldsmiths, University of London (2022), as a DAAD scholarship holder, as well as a BA in Fine Art at the Department of Film (2020) from the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg. Since 2023 she is part of the selection committee for the →International Shortfilm Festival Hamburg. Kellein has received the Hamburg Work Scholarship (2024) from the City of Hamburg, was shortlisted for MAK Schindler Scholarship, Vienna (2023) and was a recipient of the Arthur Boskamp Foundation Award (2022) in Hohenlockstedt.

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