Lena Violetta Leitner is an artist who very often seeks a direct engagement with the audience. Her participatory and collaboratively-driven practice makes room for interactive portocols of communication, whereby open-ended artistic processes can be both profoundly serious and ostensibly entertaining.

For this context, she sets up a reality show contest involving plants, selecting a few exemplars that belong to various invasive species, which, according to to the competition brief, bear the stigma of being seen as „foreign“. Thus, the public in Graz is invited to vote through a QR code for the ones that will be eliminated from the city‘s planting plan, gradually excluding, week after week, those that are deemed unworthy of public display.

As in other instances, the artist connects her ecological concerns with geo-political and social issues, without deflecting the attention from the former, but seeking to examine their points of intersection in a way that highlights their co-dependancy and mutual enforcement. This does not mean, however, that she is not mischievously devising escape routes out of these entangled predicaments.

Magda Radu
curator, Salonul de projecte
in: „Promotion Prize of the Province of Styria for Contemporary Fine Arts 2023“