Daniela Paes Leão (b. Coimbra, 1974) graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto. Paes Leão has been an artist in residence at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervillies (Paris), The Blue House (Amsterdam), Arting Jerusalem (Jerusalem) and Fondazione Pistoletto (Biela). Her work has been exhibited internationally at the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennial, Guimarães – European Capital of Cultural 2012, Tate Britain (London), the South London Gallery (London), Cube Project Space (Taipei), Miami Art Fair (Miami) and W139 (Amsterdam) among others. She has received grants from inter alia the European Cultural Foundation, Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, the Mondriaan Fund, DOEN Foundation and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. Paes Leão currently lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Paes Leão is a multidisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice engages urgent social and ecological questions, not as themes to represent, but as realities that demand position, method, and consequence. Her work begins where public life is being hollowed out, by inequality, institutional abdication, extractive economies, and the quiet normalisation of crisis. Through film, drawing, performance, installation, and community-based projects, she constructs situations in which people can speak, rehearse, and test other ways of living together. Collaboration is central to her process, with residents, activists, and researchers from fields such as sociology, economics, and anthropology. Research in her work is never neutral, it is a tool for accountability. Rather than producing closed narratives, Paes Leão often works with forms that stay deliberately unfinished, inviting participation and responsibility. She treats imagination as infrastructure, a space where alternative futures can be practised in the present, in streets, neighbourhoods, cultural institutions, and civic spaces. Her projects move between analysis and action, combining poetic language with concrete interventions that challenge the systems shaping everyday life. Across her practice runs a refusal of “awareness” as an endpoint. The work insists on agency, who gets to decide, who gets heard, and what becomes possible when we stop accepting crisis as inevitable. Paes Leão’s artistic journey has increasingly embraced creative forms of civil disobedience and collective strategy, seeking not only to interpret the world, but to shift it.
" My work reads like a long, stubborn argument with the idea that art should be “about society” without ever touching it. Again and again I refuse the safe position of commentator, I place myself inside the friction, inside the institutions, inside the street, inside a neighbourhood that is being redesigned around someone else’s comfort. The thread running through everything is not simply “social issues”, it is the question of agency, who gets to shape reality, who gets to narrate it, who is forced to live inside decisions made elsewhere.
A first axis is my insistence on art as a tool for civic imagination that stays accountable to material conditions. In projects like Museu da Crise and the Parallel Worlds drawings, imagination is not decorative, it is infrastructural. I treat “possible worlds” as something we build by rehearsing, prototyping, and distributing proposals into public space, not as an aesthetic mood-board. The drawings are deliberately incomplete, which is crucial, they demand the viewer’s participation, and they acknowledge that political transformation is always unfinished, contested, partial. This is a politics of invitation, but not a soft one, it invites people into responsibility.
A second axis is my consistent critique of neoliberalism as a cultural logic, not only an economic policy. Unshackled is a good example, it responds to an institutional crisis by turning the exhibition context into a site of testimony and analysis. I treat cultural institutions as workplaces, as political actors, as places where power hides behind “professionalism” and “quality”. This is also present in the early video essays, where I keep returning to the gap between people and governance, between lived reality and the stories states tell about themselves. I don’t romanticise “the public”, but I also don’t accept the alibi that complexity makes change impossible.
A third axis is method, how I work. My practice is research-driven, but it refuses the fantasy of neutral research. I collaborate with sociologists, economists, anthropologists, activists, residents, and I also collaborate with context itself, the street, the pavilion, the café, the boat route, the sticker, the banner. What emerges is a kind of situated pedagogy, I construct conditions for others to speak, act, design, argue, and I document those conditions as artworks. That documentation is not an afterthought, it is part of how the work travels, how it becomes usable, how it becomes a resource.
Then there is the ethical spine of my practice, a refusal to let “awareness” be mistaken for impact. In #700PIECES I make responsibility bodily, repetitive, and specific, not abstract. The gesture, collecting my own 700 pieces, is almost painfully straightforward, it exposes how easily we outsource accountability to statistics and policy talk. The macro photographs turn waste into an alien landscape, but the point is not spectacle, it is a warning about adaptation, nature will persist, we might not. That sentence lands because my work repeatedly insists on the difference between survival and justice.
If I had to name what my work is “about” in one line, it is about the struggle to reclaim public life from systems that privatise, silence, and extract, and about building aesthetic forms that are not substitutes for politics, but rehearsals for it. My projects keep asking, what can art do when it stops auditioning for relevance and starts organising it."