RE-COIL | OpenArtLink 2025 Piraeus
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“Recoil” signifies not only retreat or withdrawal, but also the elastic return that follows. While the word is usually associated with guns and other military equipment, we challenge a different reading: from a feminist perspective, it embodies an ambivalent motion — being pushed back by social power structures while simultaneously transforming that displacement into renewed strength. Here, retreat is not perceived as weakness, but as resilience — a moment of gathering force, building tension, and opening new possibilities.
Read as “re-coil,” the word also evokes the act of coiling again – as a deliberate act of intertwining and redirecting forces. This gesture is not merely mechanical but deeply affective: the slow re- coiling of a string that has loosened is an act of patience and care, of re-evaluation and re- ordering. It sets things in place so that a new beginning can unfold. Re-coiling is not just preparation work but an integral part of any renewal, a quiet insistence that beginnings are always built on the labor of tending and gathering. Picking up threads, loosening knots, and tying new connections creates a feminist space of action in which vulnerability and resistance are inseparably interwoven.
In the port of Piraeus this reading finds a concrete echo: ropes that hold weight snap back when they break; currents pull, boats give way and return. The harbor is a place traditionally associated with male-coded labor and global circulation – and amidst ropes, rust, and concrete walls, “Re-coil” negotiates both patriarchal backlash and resistant rebound: withdrawal becomes counterforce. Austrian and Greek artists working in painting, textiles, and performance present existing works while also developing a joint installation on site. This installation will be activated through performance, embodying “Recoil” not only as a narrative but as lived practice – a poetics of tension, care, and renewed, self-determined orientation.
Curated by: Marlene Heidinger
Artists: Marilena Georgantzi, Marlene Heidinger, Daphnis Monastiriotis, Eirini Tiniakou.
The exhibition is presented at OpenArtLink 2025 | Piraeus Project, an initiative organised by CHEAPART and keramikos_23, aimed to unite international artists from diverse disciplines to explore innovation and creative exchange.
OpenArtLink 2025
Piraeus-Project
Athinon 8-12, 185 40, Piraeus 185 40
22 - 26 October, 2025
Opening: Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Organised by: CHEAPART, keramikos_23
Georg Georgakopoulos, Paolo Incarnato, Fotini Kapiris, Thalia Kerouli
https://www.openartlink.com
