Independent presentations, Artists and Curators | Back to Athens 2021
An integral part of "Back to Athens 2021: Profiles of the Future: An inquiry into the limits of the possible", is the exploration of artists in smaller groups or individually. Unexpected interpretations of present-day issues and conditions unfold in unconventional spaces within the grand architectural mansion, the Isaiah Palace, which emerges from yesterday to the challenges of the future.
Dimitri Yin (Phoenix Athens Gallery and Residency), Tasos Liakopoulos (curated by: Eva Nathena), Venia Dimitrakopoulou, Vicky Betsou, Nikos Giavropoulos, Paolo Incarnato (curated by: Stratis Pantazis), Panos Profitis, Marina Papadaki.
Isaiah Mansion
65 Patission & Ioulianou, Athens, 104 33
1st floor
“Memory Vessel”, Dimitri Yin, Phoenix Athens Gallery and Residency
Installation
"Bureaucracy”, Tasos Liakopoulos
Curated by: Eva Nathena
Installation
I write = I draw symbols
(letters, numbers)
on a surface.
Related words: writer,
office, bureaucracy.
Tasos Liakopoulo's installation (bureaucracy) takes on a completely new dimension, form and meaning and consequently, semiology in its presentation at the Isaiah Palace; a setting that narrates a completely different time and era.
Bureaucracy (the main commentary of the artwork) is the ultimate inhibitor of creation, the negative of human "order-administration", a chaotic mechanism that was invented to secure and protect our civilisation's conquests, yet ends up undermining them. The installation renounces bureaucracy overall, it creates and incorporates a Kafkaesque landscape and describes Chaos - as given through the title of the work.
The feeling commonly expressed, is the end of the bureaucracy.
The artwork inserts a period to mark - if not a definite hault - to the future and is called upon to become a part of the past installed within the environment that hosts it.
“SUDDEN WAR 2020”, Venia Dimitrakopoulou
Sound installation
During the first self-imprisonment due the Covid-19 pandemic the artist wanted to do something with everything that emerged unexpectedly and often violently in terms of their unprecedented intensity. Venia Dimitrakopoulou worked with every she had and she was recording her voice using a smartphone, then she asked the composer Panayotis Kalantzopoulos to create music based on her words. As the artist says “When I heard the result, I was surprised. It was like that time, through the distance, two different worlds shaking hands for a while. It was like a warm handshake when the touch was missing”. Then other recordings followed and from their collaboration was created “Sudden War”, a project consisting of 12 + 1 standalone tracks that can be heard either all together or as standalone artworks. “It is an artwork that talks about an unexpected encounter, a stranger, a strong connection and a war that suddenly turned everything upside down”.
Everything is within us. Light and darkness. Strength and weakness. Courage and fear. Hope and despair. How long are they be attached to us?
Venia Dimitrakopoulou
War and Peace Suddenly
...with the end of the era of the physical handshake, touch, we invent ways to maintain the same intensity and substance to feel, to understand, to touch each other. One way that comes naturally to me, is to try music for the first time, to accompany poetry, speech. In poetry the sequence of words creates a vibration. By adding music, this vibration intensifies and multiplies.
It changes the isolated poem into a new work.
In this way, they "shake hands."
Panayiotis Kalantzopoulos
Concept, text, vocals: Venia Dimitrakopoulou
Music: Panayiotis Kalantzopoulos
Duration: 4:03 & 1:34 min.
2nd floor
“Invisible people”, Vicky Betsou
Experimental documentary
“June 2021, just after the long Lock-down. A large art exhibition is going to take place in Isaiah Mansion, a former luxury apartment house built in 1923 at Athens center. All artists, curators and art people are very happy to meet again in real space, after a long year of quarantine and online events. I visit the building to see the space where I will install my work.
I go back to photograph the exquisite building's interiors.
That day, there is a cleaning company in the building, preparing the space for the event opening. I watch through the lens the interiors of the abandoned building being cleaned and treated by a group of young immigrants. As time passes, they get used to my presence and start to reveal a parallel reality that we don't look at or almost always forget about.
This video is a spontaneous documentation of my experience in Isaiah mansion on 16th of June 21 from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. The video projection during the exhibition refolded the interiors inside the same building, depicting a different, parallel time bracket and reality.”
Vicky Betsou
“The distance room”, Nikos Giavropoulos
Installation
After this covid pandemic, the next one is soon to be expected!
Although not completely obvious yet, our perception of reality has undergone irreversible change disruption. This is because the pandemic evolves faster than our perception of it.
Time is discontinued and fractured, it doesn't correspond to the linear illusion we had created, real objects are replaced by virtual representations and sexual activity is distanced from physical contact, performed remotely.
The "room of distance" is an installation which consists of a non-clock, a vase of flowers in the form of an animated image and a sculpture that stands decoratively, representing a "still life" of sexuality.
3rd floor
"Epic
-003- ", Paolo Incarnato
Curated by: Stratis Pantazis
Installation
The art of the Italian Paolo Incarnato brings to the surface ancient, contemporary and future issues and questions. His latest series Epic (2018-21) – at the Isaiah House, built in 1923 on Patision Street, which reveals the prestige of a past era and until today houses the Stavrakos Film School – explores with a dose of sarcasm the present and the future while reactivating memory.
In particular, the sculptures consist of recyclable cans of contemporary products and other metal objects such as antennas and gas cylinders. Scenes, reminiscent of those of everyday life and myth, which decorate the Ancient Greek vases and amphorae, are painted on the surfaces. The images he creates are contemporary, surrounded by an Ancient Greek atmosphere, since we discover ancient Greeks in a current situation, such as eating popcorn and holding a remote control, doing a coronavirus self-test and working in front of their laptops. He represents ?epic” scenes of the present on everyday industrial items that could become points of reference and objects of study for the future archaeologist and historian.
“Natural equivalence”, Panos Profitis, Marina Papadaki
Painting, sculpture
“It is in the Renaissance that the false is born along with the natural. From the fake shirt in front to the use of the fork as artificial prosthesis, to the stucco interiors and the great baroque theatrical machinery. The entire classical era belongs par excellence to the theatre.... In the churches and palaces stucco is wed to all forms, imitates everything- velvet curtains, wooden corniches, charnel swelling of the flesh. Stucco exorcises the unlikely confusion of matter into a single new substance, a sort of general equivalent of all others, and is prestigious theatrically because it is itself a representative substance, a mirror of all the others.”
Jean Baudrillard
This is a part of Jean Baudrillard's text "Stucco Angel". Megaron Isaiah may not be a building with a renaissance architecture, however, in 1923, the period when it was built, carries elements of an architectural eclecticism with plaster decorative elements inside and outside of it which represent different motifs from nature. The forgery is the dominant form of the classical period from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, before we reach the present phase of simulation. By conjuncture, the building houses the Stavrakos Film School for decades. Thus, the building fatally has in its "bowels" an underlying theatricality which overflows in the corridors of the Palace and echoes the political extensions described by Baudrillard.
On the occasion of the space and the Angels of Stucco, Marina Papadaki and Panos Profitis present works that put nature and the body (imaginary - symbolic - real) in the epicenter. While the two artists have different artistic practices, there are common points such as the biological exploitation and instrumentation of man / nature, the human-machine relationship, reproduction and copying in the work of art but also the industrialized society.
The element of (re)production there is in Papadaki's paintings through the representation of a Ford-ism environment, but also in the sculptural installations of the Profitis where the forms are repeated like copies of a defective machine. At the same time, there is an underlying sarcasm. The rails in Papadaki's paintings are depict the frenzy of the "Modern Times" production line (Charlie Chaplin) and highlights the dipole power-knowledge in our rationally constructed reality, while the sculptures of the Prophet seem to have sprung from the same rational universe where Nature / human and machine boundaries are not clear.
Installations and screenings by Independent Artists and Curators are presented in context of Back to Athens 8 International Arts Festival.
The events consider 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
Independent presentations, Artists and Curators Back to Athens 2021, 1st /2nd/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
