Athens Photo Festival 2018 – Exhibitions

6 June – 29 July, 2018

Benaki Museum, Pireos St. Annexe

Opening: Wednesday 6 June, 2018, 20:30
Opening hours: Tuesday, Wednesday: 11:00-21:00 | Thursday: 10:00-23:00 | Friday-Sunday: 11:00-21:00

Info via https://www.photofestival.gr/exhibitions

Yorgos Karailias, Yannis Karpouzis, Yorgos Prinos, Pavlos Fysakis (GR)
The Observatory
[Random Access Images]

The “Observatory” is a construction within a construction, a mechanism that bridges proximity with distance, a switch between passive and active control, an attempt to defamiliarize the bearer of representation in order to regain its content, an experience of reflected gaze, an experiment of reverse reconstitution of the photographic act.

Welcome to the “Observatory” of the new social reality’s subjects.

Margarita Yoko Nikitaki (GR)
Soil
[Constructive Worlds]

Athens is condensed, homogeneous and grey.
Although it is surrounded by four large mountains and built around a number of hills, the bare ground can hardly be seen anymore.
The new soil is concrete and so is the new horizon.

Mari Masouridou (GR)
The Nameless Dread
[Sheltering the self]

‘’The Nameless Dread’’ – a psychoanalytical term firstly introduced by Wilfred Bion – is an attempt to visually approach the dreadful feeling of emptiness and non-understandable anxiety, through a fictional and intellectual prism. While everyone remembers their childhood fears, it is not easy to understand this nameless dread that follows us in adulthood. By seeing the human mind as a cave swarming with odd beings, symbols and strange objects, most of them unconscious and unilluminated, photographs are used as a visual representation of the journey into the unknowable parts of consciousness and as projections of all the negative feelings I might have not been able to conceptualize as a child. The Nameless Dread is the entry into the cave, an imaginary re-entry into the womb of the mother, a place where thoughts go when they are forgotten.

Petros Efstathiadis (GR)
Gold rush
[Constructive Worlds]

Liparo, Greece. The village, where photographer Petros Efstathiadis was born, has been the setting of his work for a decade. There, in his surrounding fields, he carefully composes minute mise-en-scène, made of leftovers and disregarded goods. This time, the large-scale and ephemeral sculptures set the decor for a 21st century Goldrush. His land had been selected to host a tiny piece of a new gas pipeline from Azerbaijan. Petros Efstathiadis brings back to birth, from this very soil, buildings and machines from the time of Californian Gold Rush. One would recognize some familiar figures, iconic pictures from an era of great expectations and deceived hopes – a church reminiscent of Walker Evans’ Alabama decrepit façades. And if the typical pioneer austerity arises here, we discover which other resource the land holds for sure: Efstathiadis theatrical and delightful sense of fantasy.

Stelios Kallinikou (CY)
The Garden of Pease and Desire
[Embedded in Nature]

In ‘’The Garden of Peace and Desire’’, Kallinikou turns his gaze on the Nicosia Municipal Gardens, located behind the parliament house and next to the Green Line. Its set up started during the English rule and it was originally named ‘Victoria’s Garden’, in honour of the namesake queen. In 1968, almost ten years after Cyprus’ independence, the prominent Cypriot architect Neoptolemos Michaelides undertook the area’s remodeling. He replaced ‘Victoria’s Garden’ with a “Cypriot garden” of endemic plants that develops “freely”, as he himself put it. The garden was renamed as ‘The Garden of Peace’. Kallinikou enters this politically charged space and concentrates on the locations and visible traces of sexual activity, moving within a new architecture indicated by the needs of “cruising”.

Nikolas Ventourakis (GR)
The Banality of The Avant-Garde
[Constructive Worlds]

What is a road when it is not fulfilling its function? Can it still be called a road or is it something else? We see constructions made of tarmac and concrete that resemble roads, stairs, plots. They are not intended to connect anything. From a distance they can be confused with land art. One can physically place oneself in the new space they create, wander around and on top of these modern monuments. Romantic notions of landscape, sunsets, dust clouds, inviting colors and blue skies, all conspire together to reveal ‘’The Banality of the Avant-Garde’’

Yorgos Yatromanolakis (GR)
The splitting of the chrysalis and the slow unfolding of the wings
[Sheltering the self]

“The splitting of the chrysalis and the slow unfolding of the wings” arose from my unforeseen return to my homeland and my residence there for four years.
Isolated in the countryside of the island, Ι was constantly confronted with my traumatic past, my memories and myself.
Gradually, through wandering in nature, a conceivable field of action was created within me, an intermediate space full of transformative dynamics, a place of becoming.
I surrendered to the fluidity of this space, to a paradoxical and cosmogenic ceremony. I was faced with the most enigmatic aspects of myself; I was searching for a new reality in which I would be able to exist.
This book is a visual notebook, constructed through this experience, that attempts to capture the cycle of an internal process of metamorphosis.

Alexei Siozov (GR)
Sehnsucht
[Immersed in the past]

“Sehnsucht” is a German noun translated as “longing”, “pining”, “craving”, or in a wider sense a type of “intensely missing”. A compound word, originating from an ardent yearning (das Sehnen) and a long or lingering illness (das Siechtum). However, these words do not adequately encapsulate the full meaning of their resulting compound, even though when considered together they describe a deep emotional state. Sehnsucht represents thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that happened in the past and have remained unfinished or imperfect. An individual’s search for happiness while coping with the reality of unattainable wishes. In this sense, Sehnsucht is a type of nostalgia.The memories are faded, while the majority of people who experience it are not conscious and cognizant of what or who they linger for, but they are only aware of the emotion itself.

Viktor Koen (GR/US)
Alecto
[Immersed in the past]

According to Hesiod, Alecto, one of the three Furies in Greek legend, was the goddess of Anger. Charged with punishing those who committed moral crimes against mortals, she executed curses and tortured the guilty with stings of remorse and madness. Here, she personifies an abrupt and violent awakening to demons deeply routed in our culture of inequality, use and abuse. She is also quite possibly the visceral expression of unbearable angst and fits of desperation in having no say to rapid changes in our moral landscape, value of truth and the banality of greed. Alecto assumes her mythological roots, functioning as guard and conscience but most importantly, as call to personal and civic action. Wrath might be one of the seven mortal sins but maybe the appropriate reaction against the perpetration of the other six combined. Is this just an angry piece or a piece of broken mirror?

Main Exhibitions Rest of the World

Young Greek Photographers 2018

Michael Almiroudis
Sepsis

Since the age of Enlightenment in Europe, back in the 18th century, the role and importance of Idealism in biology, as well as in other natural sciences, is imparted as a “unified classification” of “substances”, “ideas” and “forms”. In the early 60s and 70s, the “story of introverting” regarding the sciences and the normalities has been put under reconsideration and redefinition.

In the Sepsis work, a visual transfer of the critique and a separation of the “ontology” from the “nature” is applied, by pointing out the relationship between the concepts of scientific research & construction.

The concepts of “disintegration” and “sepsis”  are employed against the traditional ontology of nature, transforming the “essentia” to a verbal subject.

Believing that every word referring to the “entity” keeps declaring a “structural” leadership, the one that relates to the “social codification” as “the understanding of life”. The essence of “Sepsis” doesn’t only exist, but applies practices of empiricism, restating contradictions and questions reflecting the differences between the “being” and the “living”.

Catherine Chatzidimitriou
Nyfes

The project examines the women’s place in married life. “NYFES” are bridal depictions where the subjects act as surrealistic hybrid sculptures. Their faces are covered with masks, symbolizing the depersonalization of women by entering married life. Their dreams, expectations and insecurities are hidden below the masks. The household items, which occupy a large part of their everyday life, are transformed into a powerful bridal symbol, the bridal bouquet.

These depictions do not intend to create a fairy tale or to promise happiness. The project “NYFES” stands against old and new stereotypes concerning marriage conventions and the roles that a woman is called upon to deal with. All the figures are enigmatic, standing in a neutral timeless space: it is the midspace of reality and imagination.

Ilias Lois
Aisle Seat

“The window seat is perfect”, she says. “You have complete control of the window shade, you can see the view and the horizon from up there. People in aisle seats can’t see the horizon. Maybe, they are used to it. I don’t know what goes wrong with them.”

Maria Lumimbao Hernandez
Black Balloon

“Black Balloon” refers to the experience involving the concept of wear, fertility and violent loss. How do you face a hypothetical scenario when it becomes real? Theoretically, the answer is clear. But in reality, everything you assumed is abolished. Logical thinking and primitive feelings; fragments intertwined and linked to an incomprehensible puzzle. The consequences of choice, burden, thoughts, fears and guilt are examined through a kaleidoscopic prism that contains all the joints of the mechanism of consciousness. A vigilant, conscious mind who knows intimately that these moments constitute an intersection into forming a rift.

Spiros Soueref
Innocent eyes

For me traveling has always been about discovering myself through other people’s eyes. The more you get to know how they think, live and survive, the more you get to know the real world never revealed to you. You realize the confinement that all these social standards have caused and you are a part of it. A part of a prison with a camouflage of civility. And then you see purity in those eyes and those eyes set you free. They give a meaning to your entire existence.

With time it is no longer a pursuit, but a way of life.

Konstantinos Gdontakis
Malplena Tempo

“In a tempo
The night creatures hide
Crawl
Scream and shout
And then disappear again

Only they know we exist

Deep within the deepest fears
And the far away galaxies
All I see is me
And you
A reflection of no one
Hide
Crawl
Scream and shout, and then disappear again
Like a night creature”

Eva Voutsaki

Natasa Kantemiri
Internalized boundaries

In every civilized human there are primordial instincts which, for the sake of a harmonious social coexistence, have been suppressed by systems of behavioural rules and norms. Υet, usually these rules do not keep up with the world evolution and as they are transferred intact from generation to generation, they settle in the individual΄s psychism unquestionably. Thus, individuals, without realizing the reasons of these rules‘ existence, can get trapped in an outdated and sterilized reality that others have constructed for them and keep living in it.
In this project I stand in front of the camera wearing an almost suffocating mask which isolates me from my surroundings, forcing me to look inwards.

Klavdia Balampanidou
Birthplace

I was born in 1991 and lived the first four years of my life in Avranlo, a small village in Georgia, in the area of Tsalka. The inhabitants of the village were Greeks, who settled in the area two centuries ago. Based on the ethics and history of their homeland, the Pontus, they built the village of Avranlo.
I returned to the village after 20 years. As an adult now, with my family. Moved by nostalgia, my grandfather and my parents wanted to return to their birthplace, to the place they grew up, loved and have been forced to give up.
The story of my family is identical to that of many other fellow villagers. Forced by the difficult conditions after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they fled their homes. As refugees they sought a new place to live outside Georgia, a place that would provide them with a better future for themselves and their families.

Ioustini Drakoulakou
Inertia

According to Newton’s First Law, an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.  The experience of limbo due to any “sudden incident” in the course of one’s life is the pivotal stone where my image narrative is based. Anything can change within a fraction of a second, and this work reflects an attempt to interpret and accept the loss and “constant-change” phases.  The world that I create and photograph is based on everyday life, but the accompaniment of a cinematic aesthetics aims to give a fictional twist and a sensation where still nothing is real nor surreal. Those images become metaphors to another actuality. Characters represent archetypal figures, being “indecipherable” while confronting an internal collision. They are somewhere in-between, struggling to reach “light” again. 

Ilias Liatsopoulos
Ν Κ Λ Ρ

“the energy in a ton of uranium would be sufficient to light London for a year”, Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium and the Structure of the Atom, 1909
“nuclear energy is the greatest invention since the discovery of fire”, Robert Hutchins (University of Chicago), A Bill for the Development and Control of Atomic Energy, 1946
“the greatest future ever spread before mankind with dazzling possibilities of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, Charles Merriam, American Journal of Sociology 53, 1947
“in the near future nuclear energy would create a world in which there is no disease…where hunger is unknown…where ‘dirt’ is an old-fashioned word… Imagine…the world of the future…the world that nuclear energy can create for us”, Harold Stassen (President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant on Disarmament), Ladies’ Home Journal 72, 1955

Ioanna Sakellaraki
Αιδώς

I grew up in a country where shaming is a lifelong tradition for positioning someone in society. What makes us escape our own country and how do we live based on values we once learnt and always questioned? How do we struggle, allow and accept? Aidos talks about the idea behind what we see, what we feel, how we express desire and what we believe is possible, all filtered through and constrained by society. In my effort to draw the portrait of Greece in transition, I came across a constant worry steaming from comparison of the self’s state of being with the ideal social context’s standard. Keeping in mind the idea of naivety behind our choices, I hope to document the freedom of the commonplace and the individual struggle of the becoming. In Greek mythology, Aidos was the goddess of shame, modesty and humility.

Giannis Manolis
Faded Needlecraft

This series of images is a result of many road trip explorations of the Greek Landscape. These photographs reveal a personal documentation of the modern suburban society that aims to highlight a transitional situation between past, present and future. With a mix of portraits, landscapes and interiors, faded needlecraft documents, fragments of different ways of life with only a main same axis, the greek landscape. People closer to the nature, a hunter, a hut and items that describe a situation between utopia and dystopia, unfold the leading line of a nostalgic narrative the viewer is encouraged to identify.

Eva Besleme
Point 3

Point 3 is an allegory of the social actuality, as if it were a scenery of the Divine Comedy. The subjects of Polis– dumb, deaf and sightless- are passively scrounging off its foundation. Since “Paradise” does not deserve them and “Inferno” was never a conscious choice but an option of dread, they are condemned in the verge eternally. The subjects of Polis are timorous and idle, almost in a trance. Virgil denominates them as “despicable”, while Nietzsche characterises them as “envenomed”.

In such a communion, the rudimentary interaction between the conscious and unconscious dies off. The personal volition is absent. The verge, where the subjects are hovering around, is a context of continuous repetition, of a consistent low-impact. It is the place of the minimum fatigue; οf the minimum effort and of the un-existential problems. It is the Point 3.

Dimitris Kechris
In Girum Imus Nocte

In Girum Imus Nocte, a series with reference to Guy Debord, attempts a wandering through the dark side of instincts in a quest of nakedness as a state of mind. It traces the mediations of pleasure within an inverted world in a tug-of-war between prohibition and deviation.

Alexandra Riba
Broken Statue

This series of images show a personal manner of escaping from what I believe about love, human relationships, religion and inner hidden feelings. These photographs aim to capture the moment before I hear the “crack”, the moment before all your beliefs break down in many pieces.

Satellite Exhibitions
Exhibitions around the city of Athens

Sailing to inner habitats (GR)
Katerina Charterou, Valeria Kaltezioti, Danae Stavros, Stephanos Stavros, Yannis Tzortzis, Sandy Vergitsi, Nikolas Zacharopoulos

Curator: Yannis Tzortzis (GR)

Opening: Friday 6 July, 20:00
Duration: 6 July – 6 August
Organisation: Green Project NGO
Michael Cacoyannis Foundation
Pireos Str. 206, Tavros, Athens

Seven Greek artists attempt to capture in photographs, their on-board experience. They experiment gazing the dry land from the sea, rather than vice-versa that is usually the case. How the sea sees us? Photography as self-critique in search of our reflection on the environment. We are the sea and the sea is “we”.

A cruise to our inner selves, sailing together with dolphins (delphinus rhinoceros) off the coast of Lefkas, out of the river Acheron Delta, further from Paxos and Antipaxos, in the archipelago of Maganisi, Atokos and Kalamos, to the water habitats of Kioni in Ithaca, to the seal-holes of monachus-monachus in Kastos, among the caretta-caretta sea turtles in Zakynthos, till the posidonia oceanica colonies in the desolate Strofadia.

You refuse to understand, you don’t say anything, watching me die (INTL)
Adam Broomberg (ZA), Oliver Chanarin (BG), Richard Mosse (IE), Daphne Tolis (GR)

Curators: Dimitris Kechris, Pasqua Vorgia, Apostolos Zerdevas

Opening: September, 2018
Co-organisation: Athens Photo Festival, MedPhoto Festival, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography

Romantso
3-5 Anaxagora str., Omonoia

The exhibition presents three works of art that focus on the different ways we “experience” the refugee/migration crisis from a certain distance, that of the observer, while exploring the problematic of the gaze. The different ways of seeing are integral to the social processes of defining and controlling the Other and are inherent to photography as an objectifying practice.

The Bureaucracy of Angels, by Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, documents the destroying of 100 life boats used by migrants going from Africa to Sicily in 2016. The narration unfolds through the lyrical song of the excavator that tears the boats into pieces. The Sicilian ballad Terra ca nun senti (that lends its lyrics to the title of this exhibition) talks about the pain and fear that refugees and migrants – from and to Europe – have been experiencing for the past 150 years.

Grid (Moria), by Richard Mosse, documents the Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos using a powerful new military-grade border enforcement camera that can image human body heat from a distance of 30.3km. This durational photograph is presented across an array of sixteen flat-screen monitors. Reading heat as both metaphor and index, Grid (Moria) allows the viewer to meditate on the current conditions of refugees through ideas of bodily warmth, hypothermia, physical vulnerability, mortality, biopolitics, and the erosion of human rights.

Uprooted, by Daphne Tolis, presents – with minimum intervention by the artist – the way that refugees and migrants record their adventure, using their mobile phones. Thus, Tolis refrains from documenting the situation through her lens, and attempts to reverse the process of objectification.

Nowadays, that the refugee/migration crisis has degenerated for the West to an anaesthetized normality full of tragic but distant images, this exhibition aims to look into the processes of observation, surveillance, recording, interpretation, all crucial components of a crisis that results day after day to the entrapment and death of thousands of people.

Living Under the Shadows of the Marbles (INTL)
Michalis Poulas (GR), Stefania Kosti (GR), Argyris Drolapas (GR), Dimitrios-Andrianos Sidirokastritis (GR), Emily Gaki (GR), Panos Mazarakis (GR)

Curator: Apostolos Zerdevas

Εγκαίνια: Πέμπτη 21 Ιουνίου, 20:30

Διάρκεια: 21 Ιουνίου – 1 Ιουλίου

Ώρες λειτουργίας:  Δευτέρα – Σάββατο 12:00-21:00, Κυριακή 12:00-19:00

T.A.F. / The Art Foundation
5 Normanou str., Monastiraki
theartfoundation.metamatic.gr

In recent years, and especially since 2010 and the arrival of the IMF, Greece has been periodically spotlighted in the world’s media as a place and a society in conflict. Eight years later, as it apparently approaches the end of the memorandum era, the question arises as to what precisely remains in Greece from this long-drawn-out socio-political situation. The works presented constitute a record of the reality of Greece in the Late Memorandum period, demonstrating different aspects of the Greek reality and Greek society. The emphasis is not on a journalistic photo-reportage of events, but rather on more personal outlooks that focus on observing ordinary life and personal experience: what it means to be in Greece now, with the ever-present shadow of a “glorious” historic past that runs through everyday life and directs the eye.

Hiraeth (GR)
Alexei Siozov, Mariza Karidi, Dimitris-Andrianos Sidirokastritis, Michael Almiroudis, Katerina Manolaki, Kelly Skoularioti

Curator : Kelly Skoularioti, Alexei Siozov (GR)

Opening: Friday 08 June, 20:00
Duration: 08 – 26 June
Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 18:00-21:00, Saturday 16:00 – 20:00, Sunday and Monday closed

Metapolis
Stoa Kairi 6, Monastiraki
www.metapolis.gr
Hiraeth: a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past.

Six photographers/visual artists present us their own view on the multifaceted concept of “home”, influenced by the present period, which is characterized by the redefinition of human relationships and the classical structure of family, as well as the displacement of groups of people who seek a place capable of giving them all the things they have lost.

The works of art presented, imply that maybe there is no clear chronological and topographical hypostasis in what may be considered as home. It is a tribute to all those feelings and experiences which constitute the materials for its reconstruction, as well as the unsatisfied longing for the return to it.

Pale Red Dot (JP)
Hiro Tanaka, Mankichi Shinshi, Ryosuke Takamura, Tomoko Daido, Erico Masaoka, Yusuke Takagi, Miyuki Okuyama, Tsutomu Yamagata, Yoshikatsu Fuji, Kentaro Mori, Masaru Takahashi, Yuki93, Yuu Matsui

Opening: Tuesday 26 June, 20:30

Duration: 26 June – 8 July

VOID
30 Nikis str. , Athens
talkto@void.photo

From printed photographs to photobooks, “Pale Red Dot” showcases a diverse range of works by Japanese artists, defying the expectations of aesthetic uniformity originating from the Nipponese island. Like waves meeting, crushing, merging, and then separating again into new forms and directions, Pale Red Dot explores the common elements that lead to the creation of different voices of Japanese photography today. Inspired by the astronomical image (“Pale Blue Dot”, as named by Carl Sagan) of the Voyager 1 space probe shot in 1990, this exhibition explores the sense of isolation characteristic to the Japanese culture, yet conferring attention to the curious gaze Japan aims towards the outer world. Not unlike the Voyager 1, we are now looking from a distance at a whole universe far from us, collecting information that reached us.

Metronome
Gina Maragoudaki (GR)

Curated by: Costis Antoniadis (GR)

Opening: Friday 01 June, 20:00
Duration: 01 – 14 June
Opening hours: Monday, Saturday 11:30 – 13:30, Tuesday, Friday 18:00 – 20:30

αγκάθι – κartάλος
12 Mythimnis str., Athens
www.agathi.gr

In the exhibition “Metronome” it is the darkness, the sense of a melancholic wandering in places sealed and cut off from the rest of the world. As her photos reveal little about their origin, one realizes that what matters for her is not the description of the subject matter, but her relationship with it.

Gold Rush
Petros Efstathiadis (GR)

Opening: Friday 08 June, 20:00

Duration: 08 June – 22 July
Opening hours: Tuesday, Friday : 12:00 – 15:00 & 17:00 – 20:00
Saturday: 12:00 – 16:00 (by appointment)

CAN Christina Androulidaki Gallery
42 Anagnostopoulou str., Athens
www.can-gallery.com

Liparo, Greece. The village, where photographer Petros Efstathiadis was born, has been the setting of his work for a decade. There, in his surrounding fields, he carefully composes minute mise-en-scène, made of leftovers and disregarded goods. This time, the large-scale and ephemeral sculptures set the decor for a 21st century Goldrush. His land had been selected to host a tiny piece of a new gas pipeline from Azerbaijan. Petros Efstathiadis brings back to birth, from this very soil, buildings and machines from the time of Californian Gold Rush. One would recognize some familiar figures, iconic pictures from an era of great expectations and deceived hopes – a church reminiscent of Walker Evans’ Alabama decrepit façades. And if the typical pioneer austerity arises here, we discover which other resource the land holds for sure: Efstathiadis theatrical and delightful sense of fantasy.

The Infernal Machine (INTL)
208A: Michaela Putz (AT), Christiane Peschek (AT), Isidora Krstic (AT), Philipp Pess (AT), Nikolas Ventourakis (GR), Apostolos Zerdevas (GR), Linn Phyllis Seeger (DE), Sasha Kurmaz (UK), Magdalena Zoledz (PL/UK), Tiago Casanova (PT)

Opening: Tuesday 26 June, 20:30
Duration: 26 June – 15 July

Beton7
7 Pydnas str., Votanikos
info@beton7.com

What is hell? How do we react in the face of a looming disaster we cannot escape from? Threats are manifold in a world that is ruled by machines, weapons, and information. The “Infernal Machine” is a collaborative exhibition project by 10 artists from Vienna-based artist association 280A, referring to the title’s two semantic fields of the bomb built to kill Napoleon Bonaparte, and Jean Cocteau’s play based on the ancient Greek myth of Oedipus. The resulting bodies of work create a tapestry of ubiquitous nightmare scenarios of violence, distress, and limbo in the continuous loop of history. Recurring motifs within the show are the wars of the past, present, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of future strife that is not necessarily geopolitical but instead, to be decided between human and non-human life. What defines us in the end? A never-ending battle between memories, physicality, and ever-present virtuality.

Participating artists:
Tiago Casanova
Isidora Krstic
Sasha Kurmaz
Christiane Peschek
Philipp Pess
Michaela Putz
Linn Phyllis Seeger
Nikolas Ventourakis
Apostolos Zerdevas
Magdalena Zoledz

After the Party
Olga Tzimou (GR)

Curator: Costis Antoniadis (GR)

Opening: Tuesday 5 June, 20:00
Duration: 5 – 29 June
Opening hours: Wednesday, Saturday 11:00 – 15:00,
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 11:00– 14:00 & 18:00– 21:00

Gallery 7
Solonos 20 & Voukourestiou, Athens
www.gallery7.gr

The Unfulfilled, the Waiting, the Intentions, the Cancellation, the Resignation, in other words Time is the broad subject of the photographer.
People are unsteadily set up in a cinematic space, which appears to rightly belong to them. Scenes taken out of the recent urban Greek past, witnesses to a futile search, ask questions, disregarding answers. The seductively airy title “After the Party” tests the viewer, directs and demarcates the search, creates space.
We have to move to urban Interieurs. Leather sofas, velvet armchairs, crystal carafes, pianos, mirrors and peacock feathers, furs and gloves, accessories of the bourgeoisie, a society of course commemorative, in the sense of time past. The color is cold, wintry full from a distance. The photographer’s lens is penetrating. At a time when nothing is clear, the image demands the greatest clarity.

Text: Nancy Papadopoulou-Poth

Hypothesis
Antigone Kourakou (GR)

Curated by: Costis Antoniadis (GR) / Emeritus Professor of Photography, UniWA

Opening: Friday 01 June, 20:00
Duration: 01 – 14 June 2018
Opening hours: Monday, Saturday 11:30 – 13:30, Tuesday, Friday 18:30 – 20:30

αγκάθι – κartάλος
12 Mythimnis str. , Athens
www.agathi.gr
Antigone Kourakou’s recent work reminds us of the inexhaustible capacity photography has to transmute reality. References to the history of photography abound and, working surreptitiously, they lead us to the threshold of a silent introspection, quite unexpected nowadays, when photographs targeting events and social issues urge us to judge, to think, to draw conclusions. In direct contrast to this condition, Kourakou’s photography prompts to imagine by stirring up deep-seated images and moments of our own lives.

The elliptical description of situations and persons in her photographs define moments whose completion requires our contribution. We need to restore perspective, to compose faces from lines and shapes, so as to, ultimately, discover the associative relationships that articulate the photographer’s personal style.

Share this...

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Linkedin