LetoKeunen

Leto Erin Keunen (b. 2000)is a Brussels-based visual artist and designer. Her practice explores gender narratives, domestic rituals, and embodied infrastructures within normative cultural frameworks.

Her work collects fragments, relations and stories from everyday life. She combines and restructures these elements to present them as speculative interpretations that challenge our perspective on power relations and the gestures that perpetuate them.

Everyday habits are turned inside out until they become vulnerable, relational and permeable. Her handmade objects and installations bring together sculptural forms and fluid materials that possess a performative potential. The resulting deconstructions of social conditioning and gender identity translate into spatial interventions suspended in states of liminality.

Solid Air (2026)
at Kassé, Brussels (BE)

Curated by Karel Op ‘t Eynde

With works by:
Adèle Sweetlove
Iana De Rop
Leto Keunen

Installation views by Silvia Capellari

Solid Air is an exhibition by Leto Keunen, Adèle Sweetlove and Iana De Rop, presenting a joint installation, individual works and an edition. Although air might often appear as the most neutral condition of a room, this exhibition approaches it as a system that is shared, but never equally distributed. The spaces in between become a way of reading this condition, asking how the interior becomes desirable, and at what cost. What has to be filtered, or even decimated in the process?

Even the most domestic spaces are organised by powers that dictate who or what may enter, what must be kept out, what deserves attention and what should remain unnoticed. They are shaped by a choreography of permissions and exclusions. They teach us where to stand and what to look at, how to move and what to ignore. They enact a politics of attention in which some presences are welcomed and others deemed intolerable.

Solid Air asks what kinds of environments we learn to want, and what forms of life, labour and attention are displaced in order to sustain them. To breathe is shared, but the conditions of breathing are not. Air as pleasure, air as infrastructure, air as commodity, air as a fragile common condition that is continuously claimed, but also withheld.

Exhibition text from Solid Air by Karel Op ‘t Eynde (2026).

Wire rack for mounting an iron, 2026
Sculpture
wood, steel; paper, ink
149x50x21cm; 5,7x18cm

Sleeve board, 2026
Wall drawing
pencil on wall
29,7x40cm

In (1) Wire rack for mounting an iron (2026), and (5) Sleeve Board (2026) by Leto Keunen, the artist presents a wooden ironing board hanging on a steel structure, a small printed patent fragment, and a pencil drawing made directly on the space’s wall. Patent drawings isolate objects in order to define them. They tell us what an object is, what it does, how its parts relate, but never in relation to the environments they are intended for.

They become hermetically isolated in order to understand and capture them to the fullest extent, but fail to do so while trying. In this case, it describes the rack in a similar way as a body. It speaks of a torso, arms and legs, a structure that supports another structure. A simple household aid is given anatomy. It does not explain how to iron. It explains how ironing equipment is held in a state of non-use.

Exhibition text from Solid Air by Karel Op ‘t Eynde (2026).

Watchman’s Chair (2023)
Urban intervention, audio work
Copper, steel
150x80x370cm

Urban intervention at Sudio Citygate,
Brussels (BE) with Accompanying
audio work composed by Thessa Krüger.

Part of of A Place In Motion (Design Fest Gent)
curated by Siegrid Demyttenaere.

Installation views by Silvia Capellari.

For the reopening of Design Museum Gent, I reinterpreted an earlier work of mine together with sound artist Thessa Krüger to reflect on how care relies on infrastructure, the body, and context. Offering another perspective on familiar urban spaces, a four-metre-high chair parasitises an infrastructure that everyone is aware of, but which is rarely redefined. The object is placed without permission and disrupts the predictability of a space.

The viewer occupies a position that is both elevated and immobile. From this position, the accompanying sound piece starts with questions around the idea of a distant, horizontal or objective point of view and redirects attention towards the chair’s siren, which is oriented inwards rather than outwards. What happens when a siren is not made to warn, but made to listen?

The chair poses the question of how we, as individuals within a collective, can pay attention to one another and anticipate what is to come, rather than turning our gaze away.

This piece was shown at De Fabriek during Dutch Design Week 2023. and exhibited at Design Fest Ghent in October 2026.

As If More Could Save Us (2026)
at Kunsthal Gent (BE)

Curated by Curatorial Studies (KASK)

Fluid Armor, 2024
Sculpture
Aluminium, steel, black sand
240 x 100 x 100 cm

Installation views by Michiel Decleene.

In Fluid Armor, Leto Keunen deconstructs the armor associated with the figure of the knight, a symbol that shape literary and cultural imagination across Europe since the 12th century. The armor and the body that inhabits it evoke specific social order and a form of normative masculinity traditionally opposed to the passive figure of the maiden. Keunen dismantlkes this emblematic structure and presents it in fragments, transforming it into a modular installation over which black sand continuously falls, corroding and destabilizing it over time and through movement.

Focussing on the body, the protection, and the tension between vulnerability and defense Keunen proposes alternative readings of the gestures and power structures embedded in such symbols. In this work, the armor does not dissapear entirely; instead, it enters a new dynamic no longer defined by rigid identity, but by instability, transformation, and fluidity.

Exhibition text from As If More Could Save Us (2026).

Article written by Leto Keunen published on the Couch the online platform of Het Hem (NL);

How the hero became my problem

The Color of Laundry (2025)

The Color of Laundry
Kinetic installation, audio work
Steel, textile, soap, plastic, blue
Variable dimensions

Accompanying audio work
composed by Thessa Krüger.

Installation views by Anwyn Howarth.

Although laundry is central to daily life, from 1960s domestic manuals to today’s #cleantok trends, an aesthetic of productivity continues to obscure gendered labour. ‘The Color of Laundry’ is a kinetic installation that repeatedly soaks fabric in dirty water and gathers lint, evoking the unresolved, cyclical nature of laundry work. Rather than depicting a process of cleanliness or efficiency, its stained textiles, leaking water, and endless cycles emphasize failure and resist closure.

A manipulated soundscape—composed of recordings of water, friction, and domestic gestures—disrupts the sensory satisfaction of ASMR, amplifying unsettling textures and motions. This sonic layer builds tension between comfort and disruption, heightening the physical gestures of the machine and challenging sanitized depictions of domestic labour.

By aestheticizing failure, the project exposes the political agency embedded in domestic work, emphasizing the importance of reclaiming everyday maintenance tasks as opportunities for confronting hidden labour and power structures.

This work was developed at the Contextual Design department of Design Academy Eindhoven in 2025. Supervised by Afaina De Jong, Ben Shai van derWal and Maia Kenney.

Publication The Color of Laundry: #Cleantok, failed productivity and the aesthetic imagery of laundry available for purchase, order through contact sheet or e-mail.

Nightshop Dialogues (2023)

Intervention at JJS Nightshop in Ghent,
facilitated by Yeliz Akman and Leto Keunen.

Carpet
Wool, silk, casted bronze
200 x 200 cm

As night falls, visibility in the city decreases. However, there are places in the city that have the potential to bring light to dark urban spaces. Can a night shop—and that neon-lit spot by the door— be a source of life and function as an urban safe space?

This intervention in a night shop explores its potential as an urban safe space. During the night, a carpet is placed in the shop, bringing together local residents and passersby to engage in conversation.

Nausikäa (2024)

Single-channel video
3’25’’, 16:9

This film uses the analogy of the ecotone—a transition area between two biological communities—to look at how laundry moves through public space. Just as the coast functions as a border between land and sea, ecotones can be found throughout the urban environment. Laundromats become one such ecotone: a transition zone between the public and the private realm.