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“Hybridity is an expression of everyday life.
It continuously alters what we mean by both the national and the international.” May Joseph, Performing Hybridity Contemporary Greek art has been overshadowed by the wealthy cultural heritage, the complex political, historical and social conjunctures that have directed and influenced the creative development of the visual arts and the shaping of the country’s cultural identity. Thirty years after the fall of the dictatorship (1974-2004), we can see radical changes in the field of contemporary art. The establishment of new institutions, new state museums and centres of contemporary art in Athens and Thessaloniki, the success of the centres of contemporary art in the regions (Skopelos, Crete, Larissa), the creation of new galleries and alternative venues – all of these developments have offered new opportunities for young artists and curators, enhancing the presence of Greece at international exhibitions, biennales, etc.
Describing himself as a “culturally displaced person”, Ilya Kabakov has maintained that an artist who comes from Eastern Europe or the Third World is condemned incessantly to present anew, to express and to draw on his cultural roots. This view bears indirectly on the conception and interpretation of the contradictory identity of the contemporary Greek artists, who live and work within different cultural contexts (Europe, America) and intermediary networks, acquainted with intercultural models. This fact reinforces also the need for a redefinition of the re-locational elements of the identity of their work, since it functions as a catalyst for the active recognition of individual and social substance. Greece is a European country, characterized by powerful contradictions and a cultural hybridity. It appears simultaneously as a central and displaced region, a region describing a conceptual rather than a merely endo-geographical reality, that is, a historical dividing line and point of junction between East and West. “The internationalism embedded in contemporary discourses of hybridity and its mobilizing political energy open up new ways of perceiving cultural and political practices. Through historical excavation, cultural reclamation, and aesthetic appropriation across different national contexts, new forms of internationalism are articulated”[1]. At the beginning of the 21st century we have at our disposal infinite choices, opinions and proposals. So we continuously cross the fluid dividing lines of history and geography, from the kaleidoscopic array of interpretations of art theories and art forms to new centres of action, creativity and communication. Moreover, art itself, shifting its boundaries and directly linking to social and political reality, today offers different ways of comprehending its practice through the exploration of postmodern deconstructed models and positions, as well as the present multifaceted critical approach at every level (political, social, aesthetic, philosophical and anthropological). Crossing the transparency through obstacles, deviations, and misdeeds, art attempts to intervene interactively in the social structure. The mass media directs the visible, as well as everyday life, in ways that enforce contradiction and instability, while ambiguity and uncertainty employ their own interpretive mechanisms, decisively affecting the production and conceptual substance of the image. In an era of political and spiritual disharmony, as Paul Virilio comments, we are passing through a period of “imbalance of horror”. In the present polytheism in the visual arts, as long as the ideal models of social, political and cultural organization are subject to the liquid laws of globalisation, artists are forced to act and create through personal utopias and individual strategies against homogeneity. The exhibition “Blurring Boundaries” features five women artists from Greece, representing different generations and artistic contexts, who develop works interpreted between the boundary lines of the no-man’s-land that lies between personal and public realities and fictions, between personal memory and collective experience, between desire and demand, between nature and technology. The product of this passage through intersubjective spaces of projected desires and identifications forms a basic conceptual tool for navigating today’s hybrid artistic reality, pointing out the contradictions of a schismatic present. The statements of these artists, who are using mostly technological mediums (video, photography, internet, interactive installations, performances) establish blurred spaces and situations of critical reflection, perturbations, suspended certainties, and contradiction. They interpret cultural shifts and, essentially, the “visible” of the invisible spaces of deconstruction and displacement, memory and oblivion, the fragility of identity and gender, and the concept of cultural heterogeneity. Are, then, these perforated and blurred boundaries actually acting as catalytic vehicles of action, communication and escape? Jenny Marketou describes herself as a ‘hacker-artist’, by which she means that she operates as a hacker of culture, using computer hacking methods as medium and strategy to build new systems, new creative environments on the internet. Hacking also involves insinuating oneself into the culture and contributing to the development of new schemata, characters, places, time and play. Her work employs information and communication technology and familiarisation with hacking methods and strategies, either as aesthetic experience or as means of resistance. The spectator is faced with two video screenings – simultaneous yet different, the one a continuation of the other – representing two different temporal and spatial fields, two diametrically opposite landscapes: one is a specific natural setting in Canada (northern Rocky Mountains), where a researcher and scientist are recording and filming on video, on a daily basis, the freedom of the local wildlife; the other is an artificial hill outside New York, with plastic grass and artificial, multi-coloured daisies which bend and turn as if blown by the wind, creating a world like that of a fairy tale. The spectator must respond intellectually and emotionally to the meadows with their poppies, like those in which Dorothy and her companions fell asleep in the Wizard of Oz; he must use his own personal assumptions to unite the two spatio-temporal settings, two different forms of perception; he must create a new, hybrid reality, one characterised by fragmented narrative unity, in which the real and the imaginary, the authentic and the virtual, both co-exist and interact. Using photography, video, digital media and the internet, Marketou approaches and interprets their impact on social structures, the dynamics of the chance, the eternal and the dialogic environment, the construction of a new culture which we are unable to conceive in its entirety. Who is this Artificial Enemy, so seductively menacing, disrupting the processes of its own recognition, exacerbating the terror shown on another surface, where vivid Technicolor hues are used to represent a once-familiar reality, now transformed, fantastic, unfamiliar? The series of colour photographs by Dimitra Lazaridou, under the collective title Artificial Enemy, depicts an old and familiar setting from her native city (one of the oldest cinemas in Thessaloniki) and at the same time its futuristic transformation into a state-of-the-art techno-environment – electronic games, video games, table football, etc. This transmuted post-modern environment, with its chill neon lighting and cheap reproductions of classical museum pieces on the walls, with its bankrupt metaphors (a detail from Georges de La Tour’s Palmistry juxtaposed with the garish, illuminated flippers on an opulent black marble floor) resembles a fascinating stage set, reinforcing the view that the photograph has invented a mirror for another reality, a hybrid, unfamiliar reality which abolishes its own codes of recognition - the boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar, reality and imagination, true and false, space and time, all shifted and blurred. The actual scene photographed is an abstract rendering, a multi-coloured, silent vacuum, a place where creative, vital space is ruled by the laws of cheap consumption and aimless repetition. Space and time are presented as a rigorously condensed reality, without human presence. ‘There is no doubt that time can be reborn, but first it must die. The instant is loneliness. Loneliness in its ultimate, stripped-down value’[2]. Lina Theodorou belongs to the new generation of post-feminist artists, whose work interprets the new function of art as political and, simultaneously, aesthetic practice, ways of approaching the polarity of public and private, as well as issues of identity, sexuality, sex, social class, women’s rights, relations with public, social and everyday space. In her video Archetypal she uses a broken, fragmented image juxtaposing two identical halves (each presented as a digital distortion of its twin) to depict the life and experiences of a woman in her repetitive, interior, daily life – the role of the woman as housewife, trapped in the material body/home, which necessarily reduces these everyday tasks into a monotonous series of chores (the ritual cleaning of the house). The feminine role of housewife played by each woman is presented as an archetypal experience, the imposed and oppressive requirement to complete an endless round of banal tasks presented in a familiar, domestic environment, which thereby assumes the dimensions of an impersonal prison. Like many important artists – Martha Rosler, Cindy Cherman, Ann Hamilton, Janine Antoni, to name but a few – Lina Theodoridou employs a pointed, aggressive and ironic critique as she seeks to deconstruct the conventional codes of representation of the female body and feminine behaviour. Athanasia Kyriakakou lives and works in a number of different cultural contexts, repeatedly moving, detaching herself from her birthplace and then re-discovering new affinities with it. The twofold, or even threefold, nature of her national identity, as she herself describes it, influences and defines her multi-dimensional work. ‘I am a Greek-American Greek woman. I was born in America, grew up in Greece and returned to America to study. I am caught between two cultures – an ancient culture undergoing rapid changes, and a younger culture, largely responsible for those changes’[3]. She has chosen the path of ‘intellectual exile’[4], seeing herself as an anthropologist of her spiritual hinterland (memory, tradition, religion, education), consistently and coherently developing over many years her own, personal artistic approach, decisively expanding the watertight limits of art, whether in the public, social or individual space (the street, the home, the hotel, the marketplace, the room, the museum), and above all exchanging and sharing cultural experiences. Each of her works – whether installation, action or performance – is an open interpretative proposition, arising from the organic interaction with a sequence of earlier themes, returning cyclically, each time with a different conceptual basis, form or action. In both real and symbolic terms Kyriakakou experiences an active, functional memory, seeking the empathy of tradition (written, visual, oral), the conception and re-location of the whole past into the present, and the reduction of one multicultural reality to another. She uses heterogeneous communication systems to devise and construct her own personal memory structures, able to determine reciprocal and changeable relations of metaphor, transferring and fearlessly ‘yielding’ her own visual reality to new cultural contexts, new spatio-temporal settings (the Sia canteen from the Modiano market in Thessaloniki to the street markets of Thailand). In her installation "Offering" she stimulates the emergence of memory through the past and re-defines it in a contemporary and future present. She thus creates a new memory, analysing the relationship of public space through the relationship with global, intercultural memory, and adding a new identity. And thereby translating her own spaces (spaces of action, creation and communication, spaces for life and experience), her own lived, historical realities. Fotini Kariotaki demonstrates remarkable versatility in handling multiple means of approaching, operating and interpreting human perception, ranging freely among post-modern systems of action and behaviour and constructing interactive spaces which stimulate all the senses (three-D mural installations with sound, light, vibration, mirrors, plexiglas, etc.). From the installations which focus on the relativity of things (Truly, it's a lie, 1998), and the Vibrations caused by musical sound waves, to the recent installation Thing-in-itself (2002), created during her period of residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York and the mural interactive installation Innocent with elements of sound and light, the artist creates severe, minimalist installations which demand of the spectator that he undergo experiences of conception and, simultaneously, ‘de-materialisation’ of perceptual phenomena, thereby enhancing the concept of relativity and fluidity of precise truth and given reality. She herself acknowledges that the new techniques of image processing are now introducing a supremely complex, hybrid relationship, based on specific concepts such as globalisation, numeration, simulation of ‘virtuality’, the emergence and conception of a transformed, virtual space-time, a development which reinforces the relationships of interaction and the contribution of chance. In her attempt to structure an integrated, personal system with special codes of reception and communication, Kariotaki has made a thorough study of philosophical texts (Kant, Hegel) which explore the concepts of the phenomena of perception, antinomy, appearance, relativity and, above all, the Thing-in-itself, the thing as it exists ‘by itself’, abstracted from our impression of it or our knowledge, as these concepts occur in the theories of Kant and Hegel. Her installations are ‘sensory episodes detached from the sequence of events we know as duration. The continuing weave in which our minds insert the discontinuous designs that represent our actions is no more than the laborious and artificial construction of our own mind. We have no grounds whatsoever to assert the reality of duration’[5]. Dr. Sania Papa Art Theorist Director of Thessaloniki Centre for Contemporary Art Notes: [1] May Joseph & Jennifer Natelya Fink, Performing Hybridity, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2001, p. 1 [2] Gaston Bachelard, L’intuition de l’instant, Kastaniotis Press, Athens 1999, p. 17 [3] Athanasia Kyriakakou, Between two destinations, Chicago, 1999. Background to the installation 10 ROOMS 2000 – Ten curators propose Ten New Greek Artists. Effie Strouza proposes Athanasia Kyriakakou. Hotel St. George, Lycabettus, 11-30 January 2000. Organised by Kappatos Gallery. [4] Susan Sontag, The anthropologist as hero, Claude Levi-Strauss, Nelson and Tanya Hayes, Cambridge, Mass. 1963, p. 184 [5] Gaston Bachelard, L'intuition de l'interet, Kastaniotis Press, Athens 1997, p. 29-30. |
Borusan Gallery |
