At first glance, Hany Armanious’s work is just rubbish – literally. Bits of Blu-Tack, old paint trays, half-burnt candles, a rusty table covered in sand.
But the objects on display at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds are actually casts. They are not the original bits of Blu-Tack, they are utterly flawless replicas of them made in resin. I asked Armanious to tell me how he does it over and over, and I still struggled to comprehend how he could make perfect replicas of sand, foam, rope, stone and glass. They look so real, and they open an infinite can of worms about what makes something real, and why it matters. As the institute’s head, Laurence Sillars, points out, Armanious is asking us to trust that these really are copies, and to suspend our disbelief.
