The video performance N°8001 was recorded in April 2020 in Zurich’s most luxurious shopping street “Bahnhofstrasse”. The clothing stores which are shut down due to the Covid-19 governmental measures serve as background for the artist’s action. The artist is wearing a school uniform which indicates the involuntary time off school and refers furthermore to a collective pressure of identifying with certain trends and brands to signify social affiliation. Another illustration of such a search of belonging consists in the artist’s attempt to take possession of a necklace literally through the shop window. The semi transparent projection surface is framed with a satin ribbon on which the work’s title is continuously imprinted: N°8001 which stands for the zip code of where the action took place and refers to a smell becoming perfume.

"Miriam Laura Leonardi deals with our culture’s addiction to references. Her work is a play on art audiences’ taste for making connections between art objects by way of avoiding conventional notions of heroic singularity, and she proposes herself as a vector for these connection machines. To this end, the artist uses her life as a visual

encyclopaedia in a flow of images that allows her to be an artist in the most open sense possible. Leonardi’s installations, objects, videos and exhibitions thus maintain the convolution of dreams, allowing us all to enter her imaginary museum. If the name Duchamp was a shoes brand, for example, would that change one’s gait? In this way, the artist makes visible a common vocabulary – one that may sometimes be used in a poetic way"

Samuel Gross

During my adolescence we measured our breast, waist and hips but almost none of us reached the ideal 90 - 60 - 90. Some of us tried to improve measurements by taking a contraceptive pill promising more female features. Today, those numbers have lost their meaning which goes hand in hand with the falling stocks of the lingerie brand Victoria Secret. How does meaning define value? The height of the numbers in Victoria’s pink doesn’t change but the gaps in between them do according to the different standard sized canvases. 50x50 (Born), 80x60 (I want to be reborn), 35x50 & 135x50 (New Measurements). The numbers are squeezed, perfectly spaced or split in two parts and all of a sudden what used to define breast hangs right in front of your eyes. What are you looking at?

Entitled “Tonsure Nuova”, the work draws references to two intertwined imageries. In 1919 (some say 1921), Marcel Duchamp shaved five-pointed stars in the back of his head and had his friend Man Ray photograph him, a year prior to the appearance of his alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy. In 2002, Carol Rama made Tonsure (Omaggio a Marcel Duchamp), a mixed media work on paper in which Duchamp’s tonsure pattern is interpreted as a meteor shower. Hence, Leonadi continues to transform Rama’s drawing into the sculpture “Tonsure Nuova,” turning the original hairstyle into a hair accessory. This new body of work continues to explore a crucial point of conversation that describes the influence of the male gaze as well as the disregard of art history towards female artists.