Barbara Knežević: pleasure ‘scapes

Monday 19 July – Sunday 29 August 2021
Barbara Knežević, Mineral bodies, 2021, image courtesy of the artist | Barbara Knežević: pleasure ‘scapes | Monday 19 July – Sunday 29 August 2021 | Royal Hibernian Academy

pleasure ‘scapes is a new sculptural artwork comprised of a network of bronzed structures, backdropped by glistening printed lycra, anchored by rounded, curved bodily stone forms, studded with resin future fossils, draped with chain, and inset with ceramic vessels. Dangling touch-discs hang from uprights, snake plants quietly respirate, cotton cords span lengths.

This artwork is offered as a temporary habitation. It is an invitation to an extended, sensual engagement with the objects, plants, surfaces, forms and materials that comprise the work.

The networked, armature-like structure spanning the gallery creates conditions that are sympathetic to dwelling within this sculpture garden, this garden of things, this minor ecosystem of surfaces and textures, forms, shapes histories, futures, references and symbols.

pleasure ‘scapes allows space for the act of deep noticing and sensual engagement as a way to establish kinship with objects and matter, plants, animals and each other. The work acknowledges the potential for artworks to provide hospitality and act as spaces for repose and contemplation. This artwork is a place for embodied, affective and sensory pleasure. Here, pleasure is considered as a radical act, full of possibility, intelligence, belief, excess and the rupture of small discoveries. Pleasure ‘scapes is an affirmation of sensitive bodily worlding, alive with the intensity and quiet joy that arises from proximity to materials, objects, matter, plants, culture and each other.

Barbara Knežević works primarily in sculpture and object making, utilising complex formations of objects and moving images. These formations are an omnivorous selection of things acting together calling to mind familiar arrangements;  film sets, photographic shoots, museum displays, retail displays and other staged arrangements of found and fabricated items.  These concentrated sculptural arrangements aim to distil and amplify the qualities and affect of the objects they display, through repeating and calling attention to texture, colour, opacity, pattern or other haptic, sensual qualities. Barbara Knežević’s work explores the potential for artworks to create affect, produce feeling, to induce wellbeing or to generate emotive and pleasurable states. Her sculptural concentrations produce intra-relations between objects, viewer, and space and propose the potential of artworks as zones for radical joyfulness and pleasure, and as ways to reimagine and reconsider ways of being.

Barbara Knežević is an artist and educator living and working in Dublin. Recent exhibitions include Woman in the Machine, VISUAL Carlow; Guest, Newbridge House, Dublin; Immurement, STATION Gallery Melbourne; Far From Here, The Complex, Dublin; The MAC, Belfast; Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; EKKM, Tallinn; HIAP, Helsinki. She has been commissioned for public art projects most recently ‘Collective Energy’ at Kingswood Community College, and she is a lecturer in Fine Art at TU Dublin.

Barbara Knežević is represented by Berlin Opticians Gallery www.berlinopticiansdublin.com

www.barbaraknezevic.com • Instagram: barbaraknezevic_ • Twitter: barbaraknezevi1 • Facebook: Barbara Knezevic • #pleasurescapes #howwearewiththings

Image: Barbara Knežević, Mineral bodies, 2021, image courtesy of the artist
Monday 19 July – Sunday 29 August 2021
Royal Hibernian Academy
15 Ely Place, Dublin 2
Telephone: +353 1 661 2558
info@rhagallery.ie
www.royalhibernianacade...
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Tuesday 11:00 - 17:00
Wednesday 11:00 - 19:00
Thursday 11:00 - 19:00
Friday 11:00 - 19:00
Saturday 11:00 - 19:00
Sunday 14:00 - 17:00
Admission / price: Free

 
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