Except for the flooring and lighting, Leonor Antunes’s recent exhibition at the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (CAM) was entirely suspended, each sculpture drawn downwards by gravity, but released from the floor. The artist borrows materials and techniques from craft traditions—rattan, leatherwork, bead weaving, metal worked with a jeweller’s precision—but a cursory glance gave little else away. It is as though Antunes’s work politely demands concentration, refusing to meet the eye of a distracted visitor.
The Berlin-based Portuguese artist’s exhibition marked CAM’s reopening following a multiyear renovation project. The exhibition’s curious title translates from the original Portuguese as the constant inequality of leonor’s days*—a phrase Antunes borrows from the title of a line drawing by the concrete poet Ana Hatherly from 1972. The year of Hatherly’s drawing is also the year of Antunes’s birth in Lisbon; the overlap of “leonors” suggesting the constant inequality experienced by the artist and all women. This strategy recurred throughout the exhibition: seemingly coincidental facts (and artefacts) together confirm something more serious than coincidence.
On the mezzanine overlooking the installation were works—selected by Antunes—of approximately thirty women artists, the majority held by the CAM collection. Shown together, the grouping exposed the number of women artists and designers that historians—and the CAM archive—have, until very recently, chosen to forget. Sadie Speight, for example, a British designer and architect and the wife of Leslie Martin, designed display devices for CAM’s building. In the exhibition catalogue, co-curator Rita Fabiana describes Speight as an individual the British modern movement rendered invisible, noting that she “was also a pioneer of an essayistic form of critique of contemporary design during the 1940s, published in The Architectural Review, which at the time was the only regular design review written by a woman."
Antunes’s Sadie (2024), of woven glass beads and silk thread, adapts its geometric pattern from a textile Speight designed for the auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall in London, another building her husband and his male colleagues designed without attributing her contributions. Forty five (2024), Antunes’s installation of cork flooring, includes a pattern of linoleum lines and inlaid brass circles that refers to a knotted rug by the textile designer Marian Pepler. A material synonymous with Portugal, the cork flooring moderated the otherwise dominant architecture, softening the noise of footfalls and cushioning steps.
While many of Antunes’s pieces recover and adapt the work of other female designers, Olga (2022) takes a far more intimate starting point. The series of lights are based on measurements of Antunes’s and her daughter’s bodies. Connie Butler describes these references as a “poignant insertion of the logic of her own body and the biological and emotional reality of her daughter." Bodies—our own and those we care for—feel present throughout Antunes’s works. Julia Bryan-Wilson, also writing in the exhibition catalogue, quotes the artist in conversation with Adriano Pedrosa: “The relationship I have with what I do is very similar to the act of taking care, caring for someone else’s heritage, but also taking care of someone. Working with leather is similar to taking care of your body."
Suspended in the main exhibition space, Antunes’s works in leather are reminiscent of portions of horses’ bridles, pieces of martingales and reins. But one element is conspicuously absent. Where the leather pliantly folds back on itself nothing appears to secure the connection, no sign of metal studs that would hold a bit or reins in place. The young woman watching over the gallery during my visit suggested these works refer to the empowerment women can find in S&M. Outwardly, I politely concurred; inwardly, I thought not likely.
There is indeed an undertone of violence in the exhibition; equally palpable is an atmosphere of the domestic. While the two are sadly not mutually exclusive, Antunes creates physical points of connection that are tenuous. The leather on exhibit will hold nothing under tension; elsewhere rattan suggests a chair back but is elongated and suspended so that the viewer is offered nothing to rest against. While the materials are recognisable, such deviations from their original purpose thwart the possibility of a literal reading. What emerges instead is hard to define—perhaps a simple refusal to support, or be tethered to, further (constant) inequalities.
Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She is a professor of craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and professor II at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway.
