Biography
Lech Sean Szporer is a trans-regional interdisciplinary conceptual artist, film producer, and community organizer focused on the interplay between art, social change, public scholarship, and community history.
He is also the founder and director of Tactical Aesthetics, a multimedia production initiative focused on human rights through the arts; Tactical Ethics, a not-for-profit focused on community-building and conflict mediation through the arts; Give Kids Your Instruments, a not-for-profit focused on music and arts therapy for young people emerging from conflict or abuse; and co-director of Samizdat Records, a record label focused on new genre music, sound art, and persecuted musicians.
Having received an education from The New School for Public Engagement, School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute of the Arts, Lech also has a lifetime of street knowledge and has traveled extensively around the world. He has coordinated interventions and exhibited his work in multiple countries spanning 4 continents. He lives and works in New York and Washington DC, USA; Madrid, Spain; and Serrekunda, The Gambia.
Artist Statement
By creating counter-narratives to dominant ideologies through a combination of socio-aesthetic interventions and allegorical histories, Lech Szporer’s work tries to combine the visual history of both art and prefigurative politics with a contemporary aesthetic and ethical sensibility.
His investigations into the conflict between human needs and institutional guarantees reflect an ongoing interrogation of the complex relationship between creative practice, historicization, and socio-political agency.
This atypical art interweaves historical and contemporary events with clinical and pedagogical interventions to create allegorical and sometimes ironic works of art through on-the-ground research and intimate social engagement.
Szporer tends to work on sensitive issues in collaboration with excluded, traumatized and often stigmatized communities, as well as the stigmas themselves. A common thread of trauma, neglect, and abandonment can be seen throughout his projects, as well as an attempt to reconcile with injustice/conflict and restore humanity.
“My work is ultimately about inclusion, access, and belonging. My goal is to amplify excluded voices and render visible those cut from the picture. I try to connect to the human behind the issue, behind the topic, by involving real people in the development of conceptual artworks. I treat them not as mere subjects but as collaborators and stakeholders of a greater mission.”