Landscape stories

The exhibition has been presented in Basilica of San Marco, Heraklion, Crete and now in Baths of Aerides, Kyrrisiou 8, Plaka until October 10th.

Curator: Louisa Karapidaki, art historian

The exhibition brings to the fore important aspects of our cultural heritage directly related to the rural landscape, Through an itinerary in time and space, attempts to redefine the instrumental and value-laden relationship of contemporary man with the landscape.


Artists:
Η. Αγγελή, Δ. Αγγελίδου, Γ. Αυγέρος, Α. Βούσουρας, Στ. Γαβαλάς, Capten, Μ. Γιαννακάκη, Δ. Γκιζίνος, Ει. Γκόνου, Α. Ζολωτάκης, Κ. Κατρακάζου, Ph. Klarsfeld, Κ. Κολημένος, Χ. Κοντοσφύρης, Μ. Κοπανίτσα, Α. Λίτη, Καλ. Μαρούδα, Π. Μητσόπουλος, Ν. Μόσχος, Κ. Μουδάτσος, Α. Παναγιωτίδης, Μ. Παντελιάς, Β. Τάγκαλος, Μ. Σχινά, Δ. Τζάνης, Ε. Τζάτζαλος, Γ. Τσεριώνης, Κ. Τσώλης, Ελ. Χάρου. Φωτογραφία: Β. Βρεττός, Βελ. Βουτσάς, Ν. Καλαρά, Γ. Πετράκης.

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[...] No material surroundings have ever deserved the name “environment,” except perhaps for today’s metropolis. Digital voices making announcements, tramways with such a 21st century whistle, bluish streetlamps looking like giant matchsticks, pedestrians made up like failed fashion models, the silent rotation of a video surveillance camera, the lucid crackling of the metro electricity terminals, supermarket checkout counters, office time-clocks, electronic ambiances at the cybercafé, the profusion of plasma screens, fast lanes and latex. Never has a decor been so able to do without the souls traversing it. Never have surroundings been more automatic. Never has a context been so indifferent, and demanded in return such equal indifference in order to survive in it. The environment is in the end merely that: the relationship with the world that is proper to the metropolis, which projects itself onto everything that escapes it.
Here’s the situation: our parents were employed to destroy this world, and now they’d like to make us all work to rebuild it so that, adding insult to injury, it becomes profitable.

The coming insurrection by Invisible Comittee
Sixth Circle: "The environment is an industrial challenge".
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photo:
left: Nikos Moschos, Crete, mixed media, 2009
right: Harris Kondosphyris, Amorgos, beton-arme in metal frame, 1997

Personal - Political

Parallel Programme of the 2nd Thessaniki Biennale

Personal = Political
Greek Artists’ exhibition

WHEN: September 11 – October 23
WHERE: Warehouse Β1, Port of Thessaloniki

Participating artists: Alexandros Avranas, Dimitris Alithinos, Klitsa Antoniou, Myrto Apostolidou, Babis Venetopoulos, Andreas Vousouras, Maria Zervou, Thodoros, Christina Kalbari, Vlasis Kaniaris, Maria Karavela, Irene Karagiannopoulou, Anneta Capon, Adamantios Kafetzis, Nikos Kessanlis, Charis Kontosfyris, Lillian Lykiardopoulou, Dimitris Merantzas, Dimitris Baboulis, Pavlos Nikolakopoulos, Theofanis Nouskas, Aliki Panagiotopoulou, Leonidas Papadopoulos, Leda Papakonstantinou, Tasos Pavlopoulos, Natasha Poulantza, Despina Stokou, Vasilia Stylianidou, Socrates Socratous, Diamantis Sotiropoulos, Sofia Tsamouti, Kostas Tsolis, Pantelis Chandris, Vasilis Hatzopoulos, Em Kei, Northern Folk Artists.

Curators: Areti Leopoulou & Theodore Markoglou, Art Historians - Curators of the State Museum of Contemporary Art




http://www.thessalonikibiennale.gr/programme.php?lang=en&byear=2009&ptype=2&prg_id=36

http://www.thessalonikibiennale.gr/artistdtl.php?lang=en&art_id=572&byear=2009

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Harris Kondosphyris undermines anything we take for granted as we walk through an exhibition.
With a sculpted bust mounted on the ground, he urges us to view “Traffic” in an alternative way; as a cyclical movement, between different points, without there necessarily being a destination and a chosen speed. A technological symbol of traffic is pinned on the bust, a plane. And yet it is built from cement, a material that automatically suspends any notion of freedom of movement and, on the contrary, intensifies the sense of a suffocating immobility.
Meanwhile, a series of drawings emerges, with the aim to ‘disrupt’ whatever people view at the exhibition. Drawings are pinned (just like the plane) among the other works; they deliberately function like parasites and spread like a fungus. They move like traffic.
These are drawings made using the ink of a ball point pen, a common everyday object. On the whole, they copy pictures from newspapers and other print-outs. They depict a series of selected stories of the past year, presented on a second reading in an expressionistic way. The original story is disguised and assumes the emotionally charged character that the artist chooses to attribute to it.
Some of these events took place in Greece, some elsewhere. Yet all of them are interesting both politically and socially, following the assessment of the journalists who selected them. A posteriori, Kondosphyris undertakes to evaluate them through his own eyes, take them into his possession and alter them conceptually like drawings of a modern type of realism.
In the history of Greek art, the depiction of real events through painting, functioning like a record, like a documentary, is very rare. The reasons for this may be interpreted in different ways by each one of us. What is important, though, is that realism never ceases to hide an implicit comment, which is open to viewers’ eyes and judgment.
Any image representing or copying real events is exposed to reality itself, especially if it is not a direct photographic depiction but is rather rendered in a subjective manner by an individual painter, subject to his own intricate expressive impulses. In raising inevitable questions, he eventually expects viewers to come up with an interpretation using their eyes and minds. Viewers are thus expected to ‘make themselves comfortable’ and reply to these questions.

Areti Leopoulou

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photo: "Circulator" by Harris Kondosphyris