Leonor Antunes (Lisbon, 1972, lives and works in Berlin since 2005) has based her artistic practice on a reflection around sculpture, architecture, design and material culture, among others, in which the hegemonic narratives of the modernist movement are reassessed and reconfigured, like the invisibility of women artists or the devaluation of more disruptive and radical practices.

The starting point of ‘the constant inequality of leonor’s days’, which takes its title from a drawing by Ana Hatherly in the CAM Collection, was Antunes’ research on the works and journeys of women artists, key figures in the modernist movement who have been forgotten or marginalised by a history shaped by inequality. By summoning these multiple stories, geographies and practices of different women artists, Antunes works to reinscribe them into a canonical male history, incorporating them as a “base material” of her own sculpture.

For this exhibition, the artist proposes an intervention on the entirety of the main gallery space. This includes a walkable ‘floor’ sculpture made of cork with brass and linoleum inlays, whose pattern derives from an original design for a single carpet made by artist Marian Pepler for her parents, and a set of other sculptures which are propagated throughout the space, creating a multi-sensory and organic experience that transforms the gallery’s architectural space. This activation of the space evokes ancestral gestures and traditional knowledge, utilising natural and organic materials such as cork, wood, glass beads, brass and leather, among others.

Through its collaboration with Leonor Antunes, CAM sets the tone for a new way of curating and staging its collection. Inviting artists to immerse themselves and personally select works from CAM’s Collection is a practice that will continue throughout its future programme. In close relation to her own work, Antunes has selected works by women artists and from historically less valued artistic practices, of which many are shown here for the first time, opening the collection up to new connections and interpretations. By using her own name in the exhibition title, Leonor, the artist feeds into questions about the vulnerability of the creative gesture itself and on what it means to be an artist.

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In ‘the constant inequality of leonor’s days’, Antunes initially started from a research on the trajectory and work of the British architect Sadie Speight – who participated in the architectural project for CAM’s historic building, but was never acknowledged – in order to weave a web of relationships and analogies with the journeys and works by other artists such as Marian Pepler, Charlotte Perriand and Ana Hatherly, among others.