Larissa Sansour: In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain

About

In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain resides in the cross-section between sci-fi, archaeology and politics. Combining live motion and CGI, the film explores the role of myth for history, fact and national identity. A narrative resistance group makes underground deposits of elaborate porcelain –suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilisation. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing lands. Once unearthed, this tableware will prove the existence of this counterfeit people. By implementing a myth of its own, their work becomes a historical intervention – de facto creating a nation.

The exhibition includes an award winning film (Best Experimental Short at the Guanajuato International Film Festival), artefacts including the porcelain of the title and a new suspended sculptural installation supported by the Danish Arts Council. Exhibition supported by the Danish Arts Council.

In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain is co-commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England; New Art Exchange, Nottingham; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton; and The Mosaic Rooms, A.M.Qattan Foundation, London; with support from Doha Film Institute; The Danish Arts Council, Arts Council England, Iambic Film, Knud Højgaards Fond and Contemporary Art Platform – Kuwait. Produced by Spike Film and Video, Bristol.

Biography

Larissa Sansour was born in Jerusalem in 1973 to a Palestinian father and a Russian mother and studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. Sansour is an interdisciplinary artist, working in video, photography, installation and sculpture to create overtly political work that explores and approximates the realities of life in Palestine. References and details ranging from sci-fi and spaghetti westerns to horror films converge with Middle East politics and social issues to create intricate parallel universes in which a new value system can be decoded.

Sansour has exhibited extensively with recent solo exhibitions including venues such as: New Art Exchange in Nottingham; Turku Art Museum in Finland; Wolverhampton Art Gallery; Photographic Center in Copenhagen; Kulturhuset in Stockholm; Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai; Sabrina Amrani in Madrid and DEPO in Istanbul. Her work has also featured in the biennials of Istanbul, Busan and Liverpool. Sansour has won Best International Experimental Short Film, Guanajuato, Mexico, and MADATAC First Prize, Madrid, Spain.

Sansour is represented by Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, Sabrina Amrani in Madrid and Montoro12 Contemporary Art in Rome. She lives and works in London.