City Dwellers | Κaktos Project
Κaktos Project presents City Dwellers, an exhibition that features the work of four mid-career artists who investigate the textures and fragments, memories and potentials of the city. Dimitra Ioannou, Sotiris Panousakis, Lila Polenaki and Kostis Velonis have all found the city a source of inspiration, while it has impacted their practices in various ways.
Dimitra Ioannou’s interest lies in the position of women in public space and their lack of representation. Her ongoing photographic essay “The City is Now Yours” is a kind of palimpsest: in each photo there are traces of another; the magnified surfaces of walls, pavements and slogans found in Athens are inhabited by women’s bodies and vice versa.
Sotiris Panousakis views the cityscape as an ever-changing, fluid scenery of transaction, negotiation and reconciliation. He strolls around the city like a flaneur, taking pictures of what gets his attention: neon signs, shop windows, metal surfaces and light sources. Panousakis is fascinated by the spectacle the city offers but also intrigued with what lies beneath it. He has created an immense photographic archive, which he uses as the starting point for paintings made by selecting, cropping and highlighting architectural elements and neon signs, as well as elements that tend to get overlooked: plasterboard, screws and sockets, cables and beams, all of which hold together the “imaginary” and the deceiving spectacle.
Lila Polenaki is best known for her large monochromatic canvases which, although abstract, include fragments from the artists’ everyday life. In one of her wanderings, the artist found herself in front of an abandoned house in the outskirts of Athens. Having entered it, she came upon a handful of love letters between a Greek man and a Swiss teacher in the 1960s. This encounter inspired Polenaki to make paintings exploring ideas of memory and loss, exchange and cross-cultural communication, as well as the life of buildings and what they stand for.
Kostis Velonis typically uses found materials to create sculptures and installations that move from the personal to the political. Despair Island (2013) is a sculpture whose effects in part derive from the tension between the organic and the abstract. It is made of ceramic, plaster and wood, materials that are found in the landscape of Athens.
Kaktos Project is an independent artist-run space founded by artist Caroline May in order to raise questions about the changing urban landscape of Athens and the forces of gentrification, with the aim to empower community and collective action and communicate ideas about art and civic space through a series of exhibitions, talks and educational activities. The space is located in the centre of Athens, at 38 Cheyden Street, in a highly contested area where questions of migration, regeneration and public space are foregrounded.
Artists: Dimitra Ioannou, Sotiris Panousakis, Lila Polenaki, Kostis Velonis.
Curated by: Caroline May
The exhibition “City Dwellers" by Kaktos Project curated by Caroline May, is presented in context to Back to Athens 8 International Arts Festival.
The event considers all public health protection measures, in the context of avoiding the spread of coronavirus (CoV-19).
Back to Athens 8 | 2021 is organized by APART Art Research and Applications, under the Auspices of the City of Athens, with the support of the Austrian Embassy in Athens and the Ministry of Culture of Austria, Zoia, Athens Intersection Cultural Program, CHEAPART and the Offspring Young Artists Program.
Back to Athens 8 International Arts Festival 2021
Profiles of the Future: An inquiry into the limits of the possible
Isaiah Mansion
65 Patission & Ioulianou, Athens, 104 33
"City Dwellers", 3rd floor
Opening day: Thursday, July 1, 16:00 - 22:00
Duration: July 1 – 4, 2021
Visiting hours: Thursday 1.7, Friday 2.7, 16:00 – 22:00, Saturday 3.7, Sunday 4.7, 12:00 – 22:00
