Leonor Antunes

A documentation of Leonor Antunes’s new site-specific installation at Lisbon’s Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian.

The newest site-specific installation by Portuguese contemporary artist Leonor Antunes is a large, crossable “floor sculpture” commissioned for the reopening of Lisbon’s Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (CAM).

CAM’s building—designed by Sir Leslie Martin with his collaborators and opened to the public in 1983—is undergoing a major renovation by Kengo Kuma & Associates. Speaking to the history of the building, Antunes’s installation began with an investigation into the almost unknown career and work of British architect, designer, and writer Sadie Speight (1906–96), a central figure of the Modernist movement in the United Kingdom, whose participation in the design of CAM’s original building was entirely overlooked.

Focused on Antunes’s installation and research into Speight’s body of work, this book brings a new critical reading of Antunes’s work, anchored on feminist theories and art history narratives. With texts by Connie Butler, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Rita Fabiana, and Taisa Palhares, the book also includes work by Portuguese women artists from CAM’s collection, including Grada Kilomba, Ana Hatherly, and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, curated by Antunes and exhibited at CAM alongside the artist’s installation.