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Sara Jordenö is an award-winning visual artist, filmmaker, curator and researcher based in Boston, MA. Their research-based practice emerged out of a series of ‘turns’ in contemporary art in the 1990s and 2000’s - the documentary turn, the social turn and the educational turn. For over 20 years, Jordenö has been engaged in an experimental and innovative interdisciplinary artistic and curatorial practice, which has gained international recognition. Their work has been distributed and disseminated in the fields of non-fiction and experimental film, in socially engaged public and site-specific art and in Migration Studies.
Spanning across media, Jordenö’s practice resides in the intersection of art, activism, visual sociology, and non-fiction cinema. A common thread in their practice is a criticism and rejection of a single artistic voice. Jordeno has over the years developed complex modes of artistic collaboration - with other artists, with communities, with social science researchers and with audiences. For Jordenö, a recurring area of investigation is the role of the artist as witness, and what they call “the materiality of an encounter.” This concept pertains to the dynamic space that is created between the person who tells and the person who listens, between a field interviewer and their informant, between an artist and members of a community or a social space they are interfacing with, and between the person holding a camera and the one who resides in its field of view.
Jordenö’s films and video installations have been shown at venues such as the 60th Biennale di Venezia, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Bildmuseet, Umeå, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Kitchen and MoMA PS1 in NYC. Jordenö’s work has been commissioned by, among others, The Public Art Agency, Sweden, the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Printed Matter, Institute Tessin, Paris, Muscarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest and The 5th Berlin Biennial. Their work has been written about in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the LA Times and many other publications, and their work has been cited in academic papers in a variety of fields such as Gender Studies, Migration Studies and Film Studies.
Jordenö directed the documentary feature film KIKI about a youth-led social movement for LGBTQ+ youth of color in NYC. This film was the product of a close collaboration with community leader and co-writer Twiggy Pucci Garcon, Gia Marie Love and other members of the NYC Kiki scene. KIKI premiered in the US Documentary Competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, has been shown in over 250 film festivals and community screenings around the world, had theatrical releases in Sweden, the US and the UK, and have been broadcast in several territories. Jordenö continues to collaborate with Twiggy Pucci Garcon and other members of the House and Ballroom community on public art projects, installations, and archival initiatives. They are currently working on their second feature film.
Jordenö has for 10 years conducted fieldwork on forced migration, interviewing unaccompanied minor refugees and their support networks. Jordenö works in close collaboration with sociologist Avery Horning, and together they have developed several projects that falls within Eyal Weizman’s concept of “Investigative Aesthetics”. Jordenö & Horning are currently working on a multiple-part project focusing on spatial (in)justice and the slow violence of government policies around migrants, which has caused “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” (Mbembe, 2019)
Jordenö is the recipient of numerous awards such as an Art Matters Award (2012) the Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film at the Berlin International Film Festival (2016), the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at Full Frame Documentary Festival (2016) Oral History Grant from the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2018) LEF Foundation Grant (2020) and the Edstrandska Stiftelsens Art Award (2019). Jordenö was a nominee for the 2017 Film Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award and was named by Variety as one of “Ten Filmmakers to Watch” in 2016. They are a member of the Boston Film Collective AgX.
For more information about the feature documentary KIKI, please visit kikimovie.com