Marine Leleu (1993, Boulogne-Sur-Mer) is a graphic designer and photographer. She studied photography during her professional baccalaureate, then graphic design at ESAD Amiens, before finishing her master's degree at the Beaux-Arts de Lyon in graphic design. With Clément Faydit, she designed n°11 of the review Initiales, an art review published by the École des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. This edition was dedicated to the artist Isa Genzken.
Marine Leleu is particularly involved in collaboration with artists, notably with Flora Bouteille, also in residence at the Cité internationale des arts. Influenced by the history of architecture and modernism, Marine Leleu was awarded the 2018 Madrid Prize. Then, she benefited from a two-month residency at Casa de Velázquez, which resulted in an exhibition, Madrid : zone de dérive expérimentale, presented from October, 15th to December, 15th, 2018.
Her work is based on a database consisting of a set of monochrome (B/W) photographic images, the construction and structural organization of which is homogeneous. Marine Leleu has been collecting this database since 2011, in which the territory has become one and anonymous, as it eliminates signs and indicators. The images chosen are non-places, by flat areas, walls, ruins, buildings, ephemeral forms, textures, debris. The physical elements of human manufacturing (materials, architecture, panels, concrete slabs, etc.) are revealed. These "spaces of non-places" where one does not stop and which one does not generally see are as invisible. Her work is to show them, to "reveal" them, and by immortalizing them through photography to extract them from reality where they disappear to give them a new existence.