Pictorial Openings | Amina Kortbi
The Windows
In these dark rooms where I live out
empty days, I circle back and forth
Trying to find the windows.
It will be a great relief when a window opens.
But the windows are not there to be found—
or at least I cannot find them. And perhaps
it is better that I don’t find them.
Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny.
Who knows what new things it will expose?
C.P. Cavafy
Translated by
Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
Viewing, as a process and as an experience, is usually provoked by what catches our attention: initially, we see something and then we intent to look again better. This mode of operation resembles very much the concept of the story within a story or the narrative within the narrative. To what extent this condition, which is usually post-modern, may interest and concern us?
Amina Kortbi, the maker of all these paintings you see on display along the Side-way Stoa, attempts and proceeds towards an iconological imprint par excellence. She knows that the dominant feature of a Stoa is the seeing through element of it, and -since the ground level openings are fair enough- she chooses to represent particularities and variations of different windows. By this way, we all become co-participants of the very process of seeing and perhaps of observing. Yet, in this exhibition the entire optical operation is underlined by the entire set up, because it is the framing that defines and probably restrains all that an eye can see.
Therefore, we have a succession of thoughts and understandings that commences with notions, continues with the architectural elements that bind the Stoa, the paintings (that happen to be framed, too) and ends up with the specific depictions of the small and many outlines of the openings to the closed up details, along with the sudden widening of the feeble reflections or the chiaroscuro renderings.
The artist has offered a very generous commentary on an almost neglected dimension, namely that of urbanitas which surround us.
All these paintings that Amina Kortbi created, [with spread-over oil paints that give the impression of details approaching or avoiding you, with gradations of tonality that echo the daily light’s duration and with shapes and sizes that vary in accordance to the significance the painter intents to suggest to you] are extremely interesting, if not fascinating, visual counterpoints to the great Alexandrian’s poem.
Konstantinos Basios
Art Historian
member of A.I.C.A.
Exhibition curator: Konstantinos Basios
"Pictorial Openings" exhibition by Amina Kortbi is part of the Back to Athens 6 International Arts Festival. Since 2012, Back to Athens Festival unites the city’s artistic scene in a public showcase of contemporary art and expression that boosts social awareness and restores the residents of Athens to the City Center.
Back to Athens 6 is organized by CHEAPART in collaboration with the Athens Commercial Triangle Revitalization Program of the municipality of Athens, and Athens Intersection cultural program with the support of the Austrian Embassy in Athens, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, My Odyssey/Hellas Group, Praxitelous Bar and Vikos.
Side-way Stoa
Aiolou 42/44 - Kolokotroni – Vassilikis Str., 105 60 Athens
Department of Political Science and Public Administration
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Opening: Friday, June 1 2018, 8:30 pm.
Duration: 1 - 10.6.2018
Hours: 24/7
