Biography

Eva Leitolf (b. 1966) lives in the Bavarian Forest/Germany when she is not travelling for her projects.

She completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, has worked freelance for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin as well as Zeit-Magazin, and she has taught at several art schools and Universities. Leitolf is currently working on her long term project Postcards from Europe.

Her works have been shown at the Pinakothek der Moderne, München, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Fotomuseum Rotterdam and the Wallach Art Gallery in New York as well as other institutions worldwide.

Postcards from Europe is a long-term study and simultaneously an open archive – a work in progress since 2006, covering Spain, the Spanish exclaves Melilla and Ceuta, the Hungarian-Ukrainian border, the ports of Calais and Dover, Greece and Italy. Looking for traces, Eva Leitolf does not point out the multifarious suffering of the migrants scrambling to get into Europe. Instead she discloses the structures and procedures European societies react with when registering and administering those migrants, in the quest to reinforce their grip on Europe´s outer borders. She focuses on the tension between what is visible and what will become conceivable. In her image-text works she fathoms the possibilities and limits of what is representable, displaying a conceptual astringency that is activated by the means of documentation.