Lawrie Shabibi is delighted to announce ‘In the Future They Ate From The Finest Porcelain’ Larissa Sansour’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will present screenings of her most recent film – of the same name – together with an installation and three large-scale photographic works.
The film is the artist’s longest to date, and the first in which she makes no appearance other than as the narrator’s voice. It is presented in colloquial Arabic as a dialogue voice-over. A female protagonist who describes herself as a “narrative terrorist” is questioned by her interlocutor, whose identity remains unknown and is open to speculation – is she a journalist, a psychiatrist or an interrogator? The film is a combination of sci-fi and archival imagery set against a deeply mesmerizing musical score and ambiguous time and place. At times it projects itself into the past and at others propels itself into the future with a view to creating a manufactured history.
The exhibition will also include three large-scale photographs that are derived from the film. They feature archival images taken from Library of Congress’ archives and UNRWA to make a pan-historical collection of both private individuals and representatives from the various occupying forces in Palestine through the ages, from the time of the Ottomans, that of the British Mandate and the present era under Israel.
Finally Larissa Sansour will present an installation depicting an assembly line that appears to have been abandoned half way through the creation of the fictional porcelain plates. Deliberately crude, the work highlights how our past can be systematically controlled and fabricated.
