Πέμπτη 10 Μαΐου 2012

“Break The Wall”






          

 video from the opening





Video: Stavros Dagtzidis


Vlassis Art Gallery participates in PhotoΒiennale / 22nd International Photography Meeting of Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, which, this year, has as main subject "LOGOS", with a group photography exhibition under the title: Break The Wall, curated by Georgia Kourkounaki, Mousiologist.

 

Production: Photography Center of Thessaloniki




Participants are: Zacharias Avgerinos, Stavros Dagtzidis, Nansy Exarchou, Emilia Karapostoli, Vassilis Karkatselis, Konstantinos Kitsos, Efthimis Mouratidis, Roufixte designers productions, Stavros Stamatiou, Valassis Festas and Giannis Chologounis.

 Break The Wall
At a time when the reality gradually is replaced by a digital one, some still claim the impersonal city walls and make their vocal presence. Invisible hands day and night write slogans, design graffiti and stick posters on walls. The walls are witnesses of the city life and record the concerns, thoughts and emotions of its inhabitants. Moreover are established as the most suitable to accommodate protests and clashes.

In the urban landscape walls are transformed into a place of public sphere that breaks the isolation of each one of us, they break the wall that our silence has built. The walls invade to our daily life and display with contumacy the carryings on by unknown artists and introverted wanderings we might never meet. As other "witnesses" of society, reflect the needs, perceptions, visions, and the culture of any society. But above all they reflect the innermost thoughts, which often we do not dare to express aloud.

Walls have their own interior life. Converted to carriers of collective memory which over the years separately record important facts, moments that leave an indelible mark on everyone. Political slogans, adolescent concerns, unspoken thoughts, personal concerns, new fashions are all there to talk to and know how to talk to those who want to listen.

If you agree or disagree with the message, does not really matter as long as you have thought about it. Only then it fulfills its purpose, and the dialogue has already begun.

The artists of the exhibition as other archaeologists have retrieved found episodes on the walls of the city with their lens, linking everyday life with art, an inevitable link to the artist who has chosen his position to be in the streets. The works in the exhibition raise questions, generate contradictory meanings and go beyond the mere representation, inviting viewers to start a new dialogue with the street art and their own reality. At the show the videos, the slides, the photographs, the sound installation and the street art suggest the viewer to consider the social and political significance of the walls, the monumentality which they hide and eventually identify a part of himself into the artworks.

A few words about the work of the artists:
Photographs by Z. Avgerinos and E. Mouratidis examine the episodes on the walls magnified through the lens and isolated from the urban environment as separate events that evolve independently on them. The identification with the message and the emotional state that causes lead the artists to the photographic depiction of the event.
The work of N. Exarchou enters another factor this of time. Her artworks record the traces, left by people and time on the walls, focusing on detail, random visual composition of the road that draws her attention. With the eye’s of a painter she chooses the scars left by time to the remnants in the lives of others. Sometimes are words on walls, sometimes are colors and shapes which the rhythmic alternations that create make ‘music for the eyes’, the artist explains.
The overall work of eighty slides of V. Festa which is presented by the archive format of the 80 'and 90' slogans invites us to a historical review of events that shook Athens at the time and shows the different aesthetics of these decades.
G. Cholongounis suggests in his work the human presence and its relation to the walls through the shadows and the human culture artifacts displayed in front of them.
The human element is present also in the photographs of K. Kitsos and S. Stamatiou, documents which show everyday moments in which the irony emerges when the lens captures the optical coupling of human and urban environment.
Reaching the enduring importance of the walls shows V. Karkatselis presents the walls as places that tell stories which include "the past which wore down .. and each moment which is lost as easily," explains the artist. In a quest to capture these stories he uses the photographic medium to capture the stories of people excluded from the 'mass extermination' citizens, as he refers by choosing the "frontal photo that defines the reproduction surface in a way that deduces to the real impression. "
The video of S. Dagtzidis negotiate the political discourse of wall newspapers, who "enters the mixer of the road along with ads, party officials and celebrations, parties, and sounds and ends at the end like a ‘political pulp’ " the question dangles: what finally is left to the viewer-listener? "
The sound installation of A. Karapostoli, is been created for the specific show, "the clear boundaries between" inside "and "out ", includes two audio systems. The one system reproduces the word of power and the other, the word of the dominated. Is an attempt to create a sound portal which creates an imaginary debate, a dialogue that is never carried out at the same time, but is always made at the same public space. "
Finally, works by the group Roufixte Designers Productions, as genuine works of street art will be displayed on the walls outside the gallery Vlassis Art Gallery at unsuspecting time, when viewers of the exhibition ‘will not watch’, just as the team of the artists desires. Armed with their anonymity and the field that the walls of the city offer them record the news and comment them with caustic and targeted manner in order to pass messages and touch the human soul.

Georgia Kourkounaki
museologist



 

PhotoΒiennale 2012/ 22nd International Photography Meeting
1st part: May-July 2012, 2nd part: September-December 2012
www.photobiennale.gr



Vlassis Art Gallery (6, Verias str. -Ano Ladadika)
From 22/5 to 9/6/2012
Opening: Tusday 22/5, 20:00'

 








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