As If More Could Save Us (2026)
at Kunsthal Gent (BE)

Curated by Curatorial Studies (KASK)

Fluid Armor, 2024
Sculpture
Aluminium, steel, black sand
240 x 100 x 100 cm

Installation views by Michiel Decleene.

In Fluid Armor, Leto Keunen deconstructs the armor associated with the figure of the knight, a symbol that shape literary and cultural imagination across Europe since the 12th century. The armor and the body that inhabits it evoke specific social order and a form of normative masculinity traditionally opposed to the passive figure of the maiden. Keunen dismantlkes this emblematic structure and presents it in fragments, transforming it into a modular installation over which black sand continuously falls, corroding and destabilizing it over time and through movement.

Focussing on the body, the protection, and the tension between vulnerability and defense Keunen proposes alternative readings of the gestures and power structures embedded in such symbols. In this work, the armor does not dissapear entirely; instead, it enters a new dynamic no longer defined by rigid identity, but by instability, transformation, and fluidity.

Exhibition text from As If More Could Save Us (2026).

Article written by Leto Keunen published on the Couch the online platform of Het Hem (NL);

How the hero became my problem