Barbara Knežević

Originally from Australia, Barbara Knežević now lives and works in Dublin. She studied at Sydney College of the Arts from 1997 to 2001, and completed an MFA at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin in 2006. Her work is primarily object-based and sculptural in form, appearing as complex, networked installations comprising aggregations of objects and digital moving images.

Barbara’s practice concerns itself with the volatile material and interpretive relationships involved in art-making, the nature of materials, the codes of display and exhibition, and the ways in which artworks are represented, archived, stored, traded and discussed. Her sculptural formations of artworks describe the bodily, affective, peculiar human relationship to the things around us that is often typified by our relationship to the art-object; our treatment of matter or ‘things’ as agents, commodities, tools, proxies, artefacts, aloof matter and models for representation. They act together to call to mind familiar stagings of objects; film sets, photographic shoots, museum displays, retail displays and other stagings of stuff in the world. Her ambition is to produce expansive work that deepens the relationships between the various strands of the practice and describes her belief in the potential of material, sculptural work to discuss and present new intersectional feminist possibilities for how we might live more justly and care-fully.

Barbara Knežević applied for a Golden Fleece Award to support the realisation of a new self-initiated, long-term, large scale sculpture and multi-channel film project. The Award would contribute to research costs, material experimentation, and site visits to Belgrade and Lepenski Vir in Serbia.