Cleopatra's Presents
Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte, New York, NY

Leo Koenig Inc. Projekte is pleased to announce: Cleopatra’s Presents: Xavier Cha, Jenna Gribbon, Hannah Hoffmann, Andrea Huelse, Anna Lundh, Caris Reid, Hanna Sandin, Maayan Zilberman

Leo Koenig Inc. director Nicole Russo invited Cleopatra’s, a Brooklyn-based curatorial collective, to organize an exhibition in the new Leo Koenig Projekte gallery. Discussing potential ideas and exhibition strategies revealed that Russo’s interest in Cleopatra’s mirrored Cleopatra’s interest in an unofficial group of artists of which they had just become aware. The exhibition’s participants is a self-organized group of cultural producers. The group has been gathering regularly for two years in convivial support of each other’s ideas and, together, further conversations between their respective practices.

Unaffiliated through professional work nor artistic collaboration, the participants conduct informal meetings in the form of potluck-style dinners, hosted on rotation at their homes or live-work studios. These meetings are a thread of social continuity between participants with notably different practices and professions. Cleopatra’s is interested in how, at its core, the group’s alliance is a support structure for their creativity and individual careers as painter, filmmaker, performance artist, lingerie designer, photographer, jewelry designer, set designer, gallerist, collector, sculptor, writer and more.

The group’s commitment to the relationships between each of them (operating on different levels) provides an opportunity to develop and continue a critical dialogue amongst peers. Their union is a place for creating discourse, incorporating varying disciplines, knowledge, skills, and practices. On this occasion, Cleopatra’s is interested in seeing the group working together on one unlikely exhibition that reconciles autonomous and divergent practices. In presenting a more traditional group show – including painting, video, text and sculptural installation — the curatorial model takes after the group’s own structure of the social event that drives their connectivity.

Cleopatra’s was founded in June of 2008 in a storefront located in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York and is co-operated by Bridget Donahue, Bridget K Finn, Kate McNamara and Erin Somerville. Cleopatra’s works collaboratively with artists, curators, writers, designers and musicians, operating in a territory outside of their respective studios to further connections between practices, disciplines and creative communities. Investigations are realized in the storefront, as well as in the form of off-site, public programs, events and in print publications. As a non-commercial art space and working archive, Cleopatra’s looks to not only produce exhibitions and events in its physical space, but also to produce and document in print and on-line projects, recordings and happenings. The space serves as a curatorial studio space, a showroom, and a library making all actions and projects accessible to the public.