Leigh Kotsilidis is a poet and intermedia artist who creates experimental participatory installations, performance art, scientific studies, poetry, and stop-motion animations. Generally interested in scientific knowledge production and how we arrive at meaning in the face of a dominating discourse of uncertainty, Kotsilidis uses prevalent scientific theories as her starting point. Through reframing the familiar—whether via visual, written, or aural—Kotsilidis strives to level scientific knowledge systems for relatability and reinterpretation in order to provoke audiences to reflect on their own everyday entanglement and responsibility in scientific knowledge-building for creating more inclusive, non-hierarchical, and more-than-human understandings and relations. ?
Throughout Kotsilidis’s career, she has carried out several key projects at the intersection of literary and intermedia arts and science. She has written two books of poetry, Hypotheticals (Coach House Books, 2011) and Some of Us May Live (forthcoming); as well as created participatory installation and performance artworks, Lady Into Fox, Rare Birds, and Real Time, among others. She has also made work in collaboration with poet, Linda Besner; filmmaker, Carlos Ferrand; and media artists Amy Chartrand and, most recently, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Her solo and collaborative works have showcased at the Red Path Museum and Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal; SummerWorks and Canadian Stage in Toronto; HEK (Haus der Elektronischen Künste) and Wilde Gallery in Basel, Switzerland; Untitled Art Fair in Miami; Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco; and at the Louvre in Paris.
Also passionate about community-building she creates, directs, and curates projects focused on shaping unique experiences that generate safe spaces for open dialogue and meaningful relations. Currently, these projects include General Audience and Rocket Science Room.
Kotsilidis lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal) on unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territory. She holds an MFA from Concordia University in Studio Arts, Intermedia (2013), and a BA with Honours from York University in Anthropology and Creative Writing (2005).
https://www.leighkotsilidisart.com/
