The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves An Insert by Ana Torfs

The format Considering the Collection & An Insert by … features highlights from the collection of the Paintings Gallery as well as installations and groups of works conceived as inserts by contemporary artists and incorporated into the temporary arrangement from the permanent collection. The insert by Belgian artist Ana Torfs is the third presentation in this series.

Entitled The Day You Were Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, Ana Torfs’s new cycle of works consists of 28 Jacquard tapestries and is being shown to the public for the first time. On her walks during the time of the momentous Covid pandemic, the artist collects all sorts of brightly coloured autumn leaves, a process that reminds her of the Cumaean Sybil in Virgil’s ancient epic The Aeneid, who would write her prophecies on leaves. Torfs dries the collected leaves between the pages of international newspapers. She then photographes these arrangements and finally has them woven into large-format tapestries, supplemented with personal anaphors, verse-like sayings.

The texts and images combined in this way form a fragmentary tableau on the state of our world as it is today. The lyrical fabric affords the fleeting nature of quotidian life a supposed permanence through the medium of textiles, emphasising the nature of a historically memorable present whose repercussions on the future are unforeseeable. Just as the breeze scattered the leaves after the Sybil’s prophecy, it seems impossible to draw any reliable prospects for action from the incessant flow of media broadcasts. And given the possibilities offered by manipulative digital techniques, news events remain increasingly Sibylline and, indeed, enigmatic.

Juxtaposed alongside Torfs’s works are historical works from the art collections of the Academy itself and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. The works were produced in collaboration with TextielLab, the specialist workshop of the Textielmuseum Tilburg.

Curated by Sabine Folie and Synne Genzmer