Biography

Valerie Leray is a visual artist-photographer, and art director of an artist-run-alliance la mire. Leray began her artistic career as a "reportage photographer" on subjects related to people "on the margins" of society, then questioned this approach with documentary and "conceptual" photography around the material : History - when it is attached to the concept of "realms of memory" as definited the historian Pierre Nora.

In her artwork, Leray examines the position of photography, through history, the complexity of events and the notion of vanishing memories, and thus re-places these subjects in their geopolitical and geohistorical by revisiting the sites where it’s took place. Back to the place becomes the artistic gesture. She engages in an analysis of the photographic medium and its intrinsic role mnemotechnic and its ambivalence, leaning de facto to one side or the other necessary to the past. Her series are exhibited in several countries recently  at the 58th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Venice as part of the official exhibition FUTUROMA and received the European mobility grant I-Portunus.

CV

Valérie Leray. Exhibitions

2023
Sinti* und Roma* Kunst im Kontext KüRe #1, Dokumentations und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma and Goethe Institut, Heidelberg, DE
 
Barvalo : Roma, Sinti, Gypsies, Travellers... , MUCEM, Marseille, (FR)
2022
COLLECTION KAI DIKHAS 2022, Stiftung Kai Dikhas, Berlin, (DE)
 
Bonjour les gadjé! - 59 RIVOLI , Paris (FR)
2021
World Roma Art Congress exhibtion - Stiftung Kai Dikhas, Berlin (DE)
 
World Roma Art Congress exhibtion - no innoncent landscapes . ERIAC , Berlin (DE) (SOLO EXHIBITION)
 
WE ARE HERE - 2nd Roma Biennale . Berlin (DE)
2020
FUTUROMA - Villa Romana . Florence (IT)
 
In the making fotonoviembre - Sac Sala de Arte Contemporaneo. Santa Cruz de Tenerife (SP)
2019
FUTUROMA 58TH INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION LA BIENNALE DI VENEZIA PAVILLON ROMA - An Official Collateral exhibtion- Curated by DANIEL BAKER - Commissionned by ERIAC
 
Villa Heike & Other storie - Curated by Pierre Granoux & Michael Schaefer - Hohenschönhauesen, Berlin (DE)