Leah Zhang works with film, photography, sound and installation. With a background in film studies, her work is a research practice around image and media.  Leah’s work usually involves (onsite) labor and extensive collaboration. Her work discusses the ontology and materiality of image, the subjects and perspectives of looking, the complexity of value and its socio-historical implications. In recent years, Leah has been making work about extraction and alchemy both as a subject and as a thought process, and reflecting upon nature and bodies in politicalized-Anthropocene.


Leah currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Constellations 2023
Photography

After the 2022 protest, I went into the mine in my hometown. While covid quickly spread inside the underground tunnels and miners fell ill one after another, I wore a mask and try to photograph the caves in the mine. In the most sensitive air, my camera failed to focus, and the dust appeared  in the foreground. Dust, typically removed during the post-production of photography, is in fact carrying rich information about the labor environment — a negative space that have not been admitted and cared for. 
Constellations is a series photos evoking the dusty respiratory tract of the labor disease and that of the industrial infrastructures, reversely filling up and wrapping the space with its presence.