[open the box] Leonor Antunes

Not only when accomplished at great heights, faced with radical dangers (like Philippe Petit, who crossed between the ill-fated Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City on a high-tension cable in 1974), but also when we are asked to do this really close to the ground.

The work by Leonor Antunes that is part of the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos is specifically that exercise in tightrope walking proposed for the spectator to perform. There is a beam on the floor and a bar for the visitor to use in order to test his ability to keep his balance.

The exercise isn’t particularly difficult to do, but it is made discreetly difficult by its closeness to the walls, making it impossible to use the bar to help maintain balance. This is the major point of the work. It is not only a sculpture that calls for use, and manipulation, but it possesses a trap that transforms this process into a failure.

A great deal of contemporary art, in keeping with the uncertainty and speed of change of the second half of the 20th century, is closer to disturbance and error than to success. The works are often devices that request participation from the spectator – they turn the beholder into a participant, as the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica used to say. This is the case of the first works by Leonor Antunes, often connected to architecture and to the physical structure of the place for which they had been conceived.

Nevertheless, its great virtue lies in the fact that it grants us all this through a bodily sensation, from the experience of the slight insufficiency of the body. So it gives us what art should do: a better understanding of ourselves, an attention focused on our bodily condition and on our point of view through an experience that, in these controlled conditions, becomes an aesthetic experience.

Biography
Leonor Antunes was born in Lisbon in 1972. She lives and works in Berlin. She has mainly worked in the field of sculpture (studying at the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, between 1993 and 1998), although she cuts inroads into other artistic fields. In 1998 she attended the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, in Karlsruhe (Germany, 1998). She has held solo exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, notably: Ante-sala, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (Lisbon, 2002), Fichet, Culturgest (Oporto, 2003), Apotoméus, Casa da Cerca – Centro de Arte Contemporânea (Almada, 2004) and Duplicate, Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2005). Among her group exhibitions are: Disseminações, Culturgest (Lisbon, 2001), Prémio União Latina, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2001), Squatters/Ocupações, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto, 2001), Situation zero, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco, 2001) and Outras alternativas: novas experiencias visuais en Portugal, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (2003).

She has participated in several residence programmes, including: Pépinières européennes pour jeunes artistes, Delfina Studio Trust, London (1999-2000); Wattist residence, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2001); Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2004); Casa de Velázquez (Madrid, 2004); Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2005) and Capacete entretenimentos (Rio de Janeiro, 2008). She has received the EDP/Novos Artistas Prize (2001). She has been supported by grants, such as: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian /Casa de Velázquez (Lisbon/Madrid, 2004), João Hogan Grant; Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2004) and Fundación Marcelino Botín (Santander, 2008).

Bibliography
Ante-sala (artist book), Lisboa, Fundação EDP, 2002.
Apotoméus. Leonor Antunes (cat.), Almada, Casa da Cerca – Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Câmara Municipal de Almada, 2004.