The Unpredictability of Possible Future Uses

overview

Leonor Antunes’s work demonstrates her interest in the social, political and philosophical dimensions of craft. In previous works, the artist has incorporated looped fibres, nets and structures built from natural materials such as leather, metals, grasses and rope manipulated by her own hand to explore the movement of line through space and define volumetric representations of infinite possibilities.

Antunes’s research for SB12 included visits to archaeological sites where she encountered impressions of large palm mats in the floor of a mudbrick tomb from 150 BC. She learned that the mats had been used to dry palm fronds for other uses, their cumulative weight causing a transfer of pattern. Palm leaves have long been cut annually to allow date palm growth, while palm trunks’ fibres are woven into a multipurpose rope. In the past, women employed such materials to create habitable structures as men migrated to the coast for the summer to earn family income. For her immersive installation in Bait Al Serkal, Antunes reenacts and resurrects elements of these traditional processes, inserting them in dialogue with Japanese carving traditions, her own sequential knotting and tying techniques, and the modernist industrial design of Greta Grossman.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 12