YEONSU JU & LENIKO SENNOMA | «re:collection»
29 Maio 2026 16h00
YEONSU JU & LENIKO SENNOMA | re:collection
Open Studio | May 29-20, 2026, 4:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Artist Talk | May 30, 2026, 5:00 PM
Artist Talk | May 30, 2026, 5:00 PM
Zaratan is pleased to invite you to «re:collection», a pop-up duo exhibition presenting the work of current artists-in-residence Yeonsu Ju and Leniko Sennoma. The project juxtaposes Ju's layered paintings with Sennoma’s film installation to examine the weight of memory. Both practices share a foundational belief that memory extends beyond individual experience, existing instead as an inherited archive preserved through collective ritual and psychological archetype.
Yeonsu Ju works in oil on linen, building layered surfaces where figures emerge and dissolve without resolution. Rooted in Gijesa, a Korean ancestral ritual in which the deceased are honored through a ceremonial meal, her paintings reimagine the canvas as a site of invocation. The figures she depicts are neither fully present nor fully absent — they hover in a temporal in-between, suspended between arrival and disappearance. For Ju, painting is not representation but enactment: a devotional and disruptive act through which loss is held, briefly, in form.
Leniko Sennoma works in film installation, drawing from C.G. Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, alchemical structures, and the symbolic language of folklore. Informed by their own experience of gender transition, their work approaches transformation not as a linear process but as a confrontation with what is already within us — the archetypal images and mythic patterns that precede individual experience. The installation creates a space where the boundary between personal and collective dissolves, and where transition becomes something to move through rather than resolve. Together, their practices ask the same question from different traditions: what do we carry inside us that was never ours alone? Both artists reach into ancient systems — ritual and archetype, ceremony and symbol — and rearrange them into new temporal form. Neither offers resolution. Both hold the tension of what cannot be fully grasped.
The exhibition is complemented by an artist talk with Yeonsu Ju and Leniko Sennoma on May 30th at 5:00 PM.
Yeonsu Ju works in oil on linen, building layered surfaces where figures emerge and dissolve without resolution. Rooted in Gijesa, a Korean ancestral ritual in which the deceased are honored through a ceremonial meal, her paintings reimagine the canvas as a site of invocation. The figures she depicts are neither fully present nor fully absent — they hover in a temporal in-between, suspended between arrival and disappearance. For Ju, painting is not representation but enactment: a devotional and disruptive act through which loss is held, briefly, in form.
Leniko Sennoma works in film installation, drawing from C.G. Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, alchemical structures, and the symbolic language of folklore. Informed by their own experience of gender transition, their work approaches transformation not as a linear process but as a confrontation with what is already within us — the archetypal images and mythic patterns that precede individual experience. The installation creates a space where the boundary between personal and collective dissolves, and where transition becomes something to move through rather than resolve. Together, their practices ask the same question from different traditions: what do we carry inside us that was never ours alone? Both artists reach into ancient systems — ritual and archetype, ceremony and symbol — and rearrange them into new temporal form. Neither offers resolution. Both hold the tension of what cannot be fully grasped.
The exhibition is complemented by an artist talk with Yeonsu Ju and Leniko Sennoma on May 30th at 5:00 PM.
About the artists:
YEONSU JU’s practice explores absence, memory, and love through painting as a site where philosophical and emotional conditions are tested rather than resolved. Informed by Bataille’s notion of longing as a movement toward the sacred through transgression, Ju investigates unstable boundaries between self and other, presence and disappearance. This inquiry engages a desire to dissolve separateness—unfolding within the pictorial space. The work draws from the ritual structure of Korean ancestral rites (Gijesa), reimagined as a psychological space where absence may be momentarily encountered. Painting becomes a form of ceremony: an act of mourning, invocation, and the summoning of what has not yet appeared. Figures emerge as wandering entities within layered fields of memory—expanding and contracting, arriving and receding, never fully fixed. Recently, Ju has extended this engagement with figuration through a diagrammatic approach informed by an interpretation of Henri Bergson’s memory cone. Geometry functions not as a fixed system but as a means to map the fluidity of memory: planes, vectors, and fragmented forms intersect with the body, suggesting multiple temporalities coexisting rather than resolving. These elements echo ritual gestures—repetitive and symbolic—where arrangement becomes meaning. Each work is structured through Figure (Actor), Gesture (Act), and Ground (Table). Ju positions themself as both host and guest, constructing and inhabiting these spaces. Through repetition, erasure, and controlled disruption, the paintings become sites where the sacred, the prohibited, and the ephemeral converge—holding meaning in continuous instability. | https://yeonsuju.com/
LENIKO SENNOMA is a non-binary trans artist based in Berlin, working at the intersection of film and installation. Their works explore the boundaries between reality and dream, engaging with themes of intersectional feminism and the dismantling of systemic oppression. They combine techniques of lucid dreaming and archetypical symbolism to question the status quo of neoliberal information society. Their art is an ongoing search for possibilities of collective liberation and the creation of political collaboration. By developing an audiovisual-metaphorical language that works with the synchresis of image, sound, and material aesthetics, they create hypnotic environments that appear simultaneously gentle and eerie. Influenced by their studies in epistemology, theoretical, feministic, analytical philosophy and film theory, their works play with the consciousness of the viewer, generating a broad spectrum of associations and emotions. Sennoma’s video-/installations and short films have been shown in numerous galleries, museums and festivals across continents, including Zilberman Gallery Berlin Germany, Gallery 062 Chicago USA, Gallery SA-KURA Nagoya Japan, Inflamável Film Festival Santa Caterina Brazil and Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany. Leniko Sennoma’s work is produced in Zaratan Residency with the financial assistance of European Union (#CultureMovesEurope). | @eyes_without_gaze
SUPPORT | Leniko Sennoma's residency is supported by the European Union and Goethe-Institut, through the program Culture Moves Europe.
Zaratan is a structure supported by República Portuguesa – Cultura, Juventude e Desporto / Direção-Geral das Artes
Zaratan is a structure supported by República Portuguesa – Cultura, Juventude e Desporto / Direção-Geral das Artes