ANCPT
The Store (2023), Fitzrovia, London.
ANCPT [Anticipation] locates the psychological interval preceding exchange through which contemporary markets sustain themselves. Developed as a body of works accompanied by contractual and linguistic interventions, the project reframes acquisition itself as part of the artwork's conceptual field.
Each work was issued with a certificate of authenticity and a note reading: "Thank you for your Anticipation", Laas shifts attention from ownership to expectation by positioning the state of anticipation not as a passive condition but as an active economic force, implicating both artist and collector within the mechanisms the work addresses.
The works are made from materials left behind by consumption. Dogs Body II is carved from a single Amazon pallet; glued, shaped, and ground into a headless anatomical K9 form, its surface inscribed with the names of Foxconn workers who died by suicide on the factory floor in Shenzhen, China. A shipping object becomes a memorial; a dog without a head stands as a proxy for bodies worked to the edge of disappearance.
Sunk is built from cardboard; an island, life-size, standing just above the waterline.
Bruxism reveals what these systems cost beneath the skin: the clenching background that preserves appearances, the emotional compression that passes for composure.
Sunk is built from cardboard; an island, life-size, standing just above the waterline.
Bruxism reveals what these systems cost beneath the skin: the clenching background that preserves appearances, the emotional compression that passes for composure.
Dethrone [Lazyboy] watches on as the ‘phat-cat’ eats all the cake and reclines.
Across the series, humour and grief operate in the same register, neither cancelling out the other.
Across the series, humour and grief operate in the same register, neither cancelling out the other.
ANCPT emerges from within extractive and monopolistic structures rather than at a critical distance from them, acknowledging complicity as a shared condition. Transactional rituals, certification, and language become sculptural components; material drawn from the same systems the work inhabits. The body, throughout, is both subject and site: carrying the pressures it is asked to absorb, shaped by the economies it moves through.
Simultaneously autobiographical and collective, the project reads as a provisional memorial to consumption as rehearsed cultural behaviour; habits inherited from industrial modernity that persist less through intention than through momentum. Anticipation, here, is the intangible forward momentum that drives markets long after their logic has been recognised.
By locating critique within the act of exchange rather than outside it, the project refuses the consolation of distance. The artwork circulates as both product and proposition, not by exposing the system from a position of exemption, but by remaining inside it, unresolved, as evidence.