Monday, May 7, 2012

 2 seconds of clapping 
(Kids are people too)















In this 8' 09" black and white video, time and place take on another significance. The environment in which social categorizing generally happens is not necessarily contingent upon, or sensitive to, the individual features of each member, which escape generalizations. One such grouping is that of the officially underrepresented, children and teenagers, whose diverging voices are, often, squashed into a frame. Already taxed on the milk they are ‘nourished’ with, these ‘growing into’ citizens are regularly deprived of their voices, or, at best, represented through decision-making adults.  

Artist and architect, Alkis Hadjiandreou, takes off from the ‘real’ setting of an American TV series from the 1980s called, Kids are people too, hosted by actor, Michael Young. Hadjiandreou re-treats a speedy and cheesy entertainment show with an endoscopic meticulousness. The children and teenagers in the audience are brought to the forefront of their own portraits. Zooming into the experience of being sidelined by virtue of categorization, the artist imagines what these individual portraits might look like, decontextualized from the blurriness of unruly media projection. Slowing down the rhythm of this TV show, suggesting that we, too, take our time to consider who each ‘kid’ might be, the video dissects, in parts, the imagery of these mashed-up children and teenagers.

The result works as a moving visual and sound rendering decelerated to show how fragile these profiles are. Time is prolonged without dictating limits, to neutralize the misconfiguration of the ‘kids’ in the show. Hadjiandreou’s images perform a sort of unpacking of the mass, where the crowd is defined each time by authorities and regulators, institutions and guardians. A teenage audience staged to applaud celebrities, making themselves ‘personalities’ by inference, is powerfully transformed anew into a space pixelated with self determined young people whose clapping celebrates their own eccentricities.  



The group show Revolver will run from April 28 until May 26, 2012 at the Phytorio, Visual Artists Association, Nicosia



Maria Petrides – Independent Writer