Ruben van Leer (1984) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. He studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute, design at the Sandberg Institute and direction at the Netherlands Film Academy. He recently made Symmetry, a dance-opera filmed in CERN, the  particle accelerator in Switzerland. Symmetry starred choreographer Lukas Timulak, soprano Claron McFadden, composer Joep Franssens and physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf and recently won a Golden Prague award for ‘Best Performance Art’. He directed the film campaign You Don’t Know Opera (2016) commissioned by The Dutch National Opera, created the live visual installation Shadow Theater (Jazz a la Villette 2014) with jazzcomposer Tigran Hamasyan and directed the award winning short film Instrument (2013). Van Leer assisted composer Michel van der Aa in the worlds’ first 3D-film opera Sunken Garden (Holland Festival 2013) and did the creative production of the interactive song cycle The Book of Sand (2015). With film maker Peter Greenway and composer David Langh, he animated paintings for the installation Writing on Water (2005). Van Leer also directed music videos and live visual systems for The Black Eyed Peas (2010), Coldplay (2007) and Yeasayer (2013) amongst other pop-music formations. His work has been screened on television: Uur van de Wolf, SkyArts, ARTE, HBO and Nowness, exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum Würth, and presented at festivals, such as the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Barcelona Choreoscope, the Los Angeles RAW Science Film Festival, the India All Lights Festival and the Sydney World Film Festival and praised by critical international media VICE, The Huffington Post and De Volkskrant.

Director’s statement

I see emotional expressions as a result of moving geometric structures that exist at the foundation of our being. In the mind of Spinoza and many others, I am interested in the parallel relationships that exist between science and perception – seeking a space where the pursuit of hard science reflects a consideration for a long term perceptual trajectory. We are tragic beings for whom this harmony is too often lost. For me, technology can also refer to the human body and our history, facilitating rather than constraining our beings through artificial intelligences. With access to many tools through which to interpret the world, I want to know what the Gesamtkunstwerk of the 21st century looks like. My feeling is that it is musical by nature, that it addresses the ambiguity of our “modern” information age and that it encourages reflection through a variety of disciplines and perspectives. My most recent film Symmetry is about the alignment of this fine balance between emotion and abstraction; the entire cosmos and the smallest particle; science and art; you and me. It is this “quantum story” that I find most interesting, to give a glimpse into the symmetry that holds us all together and encourage the viewer to mirror their own perceptive worlds.