‘In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain’ resides in the intersection between Sci-Fi, archaeology and global politics.
In this ambitious show, Larissa Sansour creates a vision of a futuristic world where the excavation of the past is a battleground. Reminding us of Britain’s colonial past in the Middle East and the borders created across lands, Sansour offers a poetic reflection on the politicisation of archaeology.
Combining live action, computer generated imagery and historical photographs, the exhibition explores the role of myth in the shaping of history and national identity. At the core of the exhibition is a film that follows an imagined resistance group that makes underground deposits of porcelain, suggested to belong to an entirely fictional civilisation. Their aim is to influence history and support future claims to their vanishing territories. Once unearthed, this buried 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 brings together the acclaimed 29-minute video piece ‘In the future they ate off the finest porcelain’, large format photographs and object-based installations, including a suspended installation of 100s of miniature versions of spaceships glimpsed in the film.
For further information, here’s our Gallery Guide: Larissa Sansour Gallery Guide.
Larissa Sansour works in collaboration with Soren Lind. Together they have exhibited around the world, recently representing Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and are joint winners of the Jarman Award in 2020.
For a full biography, click here.
