Larissa Sansour Featured in Frieze Magazine

Ellen Mara De Wachter, Frieze, May 1, 2017

Frieze magazine features Larissa Sansour in an article titled Imagined Communities that investigates how various artists are visualizing a world in which borders no longer define who we are. "For over two decades, Larissa Sansour has addressed these questions in her videos and photographs. For Space Exodus (2009), she recreated a moon landing with the Palestinian flag, while in Nation Estate (2012), she imagines a solution to the issue of Palestinian statehood in a gigantic skyscraper: a vertical city with floors devoted to Jersulaem, Bethlehem's Manger Square and the Mediterranean coast.

 

Sansours's latest work, In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain (2016) is a 28 minute science-fiction video telling the story of a 'narrative resistance leader' whose outlawed group buries porcelain dishes in disputed land for future archaeologists to unearth. Here, warfare is archaeological; by planting 'facts in the ground'. [...] Porcelain doesn't have a particular significance in Palestine, which is one of the reasons the rebel leader in Sansour's video chooses it as the 'trademark' of her people. As Lind explained to me: 'Her logic is that, in order for archaeologists and historians to be prompted to revise their current understanding of the region (and for such a revision to eventually cause political change), the material introduced needs to conflict with expectations and traditions. Only if the plates constitute a foreign element will there be grounds for a revision."