Artist Workshop: Material affinities with Barbara Knežević

Deep time empaths uses the material language and colour palette of construction sites to create an empathetic and affective response to materials usually considered secondary, detritus, or junk. This workshop explores simple actions such as tying, knotting, cutting and dying to uncover transformational relationships with ordinary materials.

Barbara Knežević’s Deep time empaths is curated by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios and supported by Hines. This off-site exhibition can be viewed from outside the building at Chatham & King until Wednesday 30 March 2022. An open day will take place on Saturday 12 March, 12pm – 5pm, more information coming soon.

Barbara Knežević works primarily in sculpture, creating formations that combine handmade and industrial objects, plants, fabrics, ceramics and moving images. These concentrated sculptural arrangements distil and amplify the qualities and affect of the objects they engage with, repeating and calling attention to texture, colour, opacity, pattern or other haptic, sensual qualities. Barbara Knežević’s work explores the potential for sculptural artworks to engage in forms of worlding; creating affect, producing feeling, generating emotive and pleasurable states. Her sculptural concentrations explore the intra-action between materials, objects, viewer and space and propose the potential of artworks as zones for joyfulness, close attention and pleasure, and as ways to reimagine and reconsider ways of being.

Barbara Knežević is an artist and educator living and working in Dublin. Recent exhibitions include Pleasure ‘scapes, RHA Dublin; Woman in the Machine, VISUAL Carlow; Immurement, STATION Gallery Melbourne; The MAC, Belfast; Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin; EKKM, Tallinn; Gallery Augusta, Helsinki; HIAP, Helsinki. She has been commissioned for public art projects at the GPO Dublin, (2016), Cabra Library, Dublin (2020) and a major per cent for art project called ‘Collective Energy’ at Kingswood Community College, Dublin (2020). Her work features in national and private collections such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council of Ireland.