Deep Time Empaths, 2022
Temple Bar Gallery + Studios presents Barbara Knežević’s Deep time empaths, offsite at Chatham and King, Chatham Street. photography by louis haugh
Barbara Knežević’s large sculpture, Deep time empaths, uses the material language and colour palette of construction sites to create an empathetic and affective response to materials usually considered secondary, detritus, or junk.
A scaffold is assembled into a large skeletal frame, it holds everything together. Materials, such as resin, tarpaulin, steel, plastic, cord, clay, concrete and pallets are put into contact with soothing handmade elements. Surfaces are decorated through sewing, cording, knotting. Limbs adorned with ceramic armour. Safety harnesses are strung beside resin moulded sculptures. Their jelly-like translucency evokes the remnants of fleshy innards, or perhaps, prophetic of fossilised plastics conceivable in our future geology. A vibrant tarpaulin hangs as a scenographic backdrop. Its centre a hole that mirrors the building’s overhead beams. It manifests the atmosphere of a staging. Cloaked in beauty. Battered and glimmering, Deep time empaths appears as a makeshift animal-hybrid sculpture, an anthropomorphic creature occupying this space.
Knežević’s methods of combining the hand made and hand constructed with materials that are often easily discarded nurtures a sense of care. It places such materials back in the proximity of touch, transformation and attention. It speaks to their mineral and vegetal origins and the inherent complexities bound up in the exploitation of the earth. Through the language of sculpture and her engagement with these materials, Knežević questions our behaviours in instrumentalising them – liberally taking them from the ground and discarding them as though they are disposable.
Deep time empaths calls for a different sort of engagement with materials. One that is embodied and experienced in the space. It asks for a deeper consideration of materials, their origins, futures and pasts that we often overlook. An affective and emotional engagement with these materials is opened for audiences, in a site-responsive sculpture that strives to bring attention to the possibility of reconsidering the relation we have with materials and their ecological politics in particular. This politics of care and the empathy for materials takes on a resonant note in the context of a new commercial building in the centre of Dublin.
- text by Cliodhna Shaffrey, Director, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios
Barbara Knežević’s Deep time empaths was curated by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and supported by Hines..