'entitled'

In the last years, Panayiotis Michael’s work has been preoccupied with what may be described as, indeed, ‘entitled’, a house. The Künstlerhaus exhibition is less gripped with the social happiness that a structure and its contents may signify, and more pleasurably associative in its flow of forms and metaphors, related, and not, to the artist’s family house, planned and never constructed. Vacant window edges are seductively abstracted in a horizontal line(age) of plank wood, hence, the piece’s title, 7 Window Frames. Entities “belonging” to a house are taken apart into another time when they existed otherwise. 

Feather padding quietly fosters the history of a house, 
in A Second Try, and enigmatic interiors weave remains 
of future memories in cabinets of curiosities. In the 
spaces of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Panayiotis Michael 
creates an ambience, gracefully evoking moods 
prompted from what we feel entitled to experiencing. 

The show generously offers a leveling kind of 
playground from which no one seems to be in a 
favorable position to grasp the boundaries of a house 
of entitlement. Perhaps, the lost dream house of 
the child is not imagined as an enduring house of the 
future but as small, passing gestures of tranquil moods, 
where we can renegotiate our entitlements.

   

http://www.bethanien.de/en/artists/panayiotis-michael/

Maria Petrides, independent writer                                   

                     

   

 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 Revolv∙er will run from April 28 until May 26, 2012 at the Phytorio, Visual Artists Association, Nicosia

Maria Petrides – Independent Writer

20 minutes – moments of form and bliss

Most of us living in Cyprus would probably agree that any development in the arts on the island is a great thing, as we are continuing to ‘culturally position’ ourselves between Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. But after the 12th Contemporary Dance Platform which took place at Limassol’s Rialto Theatre from March 9th to 11th, some twitchy gestures, and long and deep sighs heaving from the audience, suggest that some would have wished away a bit of dance and theatricality. And this wish isn’t necessarily an ill-intended one; it’s a charged change from an unreceptive Cyprus audience to a brave one equipped to raise its critical voice.

There’s a certain magical challenge that comes with having a dense amount of time in which to present and perform. And there’s also an equal challenge for a lively audience to remain intrigued in the present time for 20 minutes each time.

Time, at all times, in whatever space created, can be experienced as a drag to our feet through a painfully slow sense of moments approaching their ‘end’. But time can also suspend our own expectations by placing us in another experience of a time escaped. Lia Haraki’s fresh piece, Tune In, worked powerfully on the level of zoning us out of our sense of time. Like a devoted dervish ecstatic at the point of a spiritual pinnacle, Lia Haraki’s concentrated and liberating performance whirled us into an airy space and engrossing timelessness.

In a very different tone, the collaborative initiative of Noema Dance Work’s, Haze, recreated another form of space on stage, and off, altering our perception of where the dancer’s body and its movement, between fragile screens, appeared each moment in relation to its blurred audience. I, myself, was tuned in the spectacular Weather Project (2003) of visual artist, Olafur Eliasson, where artificial mist permeating the air and a yolk sun rising out of the haze to illuminate the refigured ceilings of the Turbine Hall, altered the room’s temperature and the viewer’s perception. Refined and consistent in its concept and visual imagery, Alexandra Waierstall’s study of haze has whet our appetite for her following full evening piece.

In hindsight, a new wish foresees more thorough collaborations in the emerging arts scene of Cyprus, and an all the more involved and growing audience.

The Unwise Monkey

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B005OK4WWI/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_summary?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending


Francoise Fautrel’s latest novel, The Unwise Monkey, draws its reader by its dazzling wit, and its suppleness in arousing suspense and evoking sensibility. In this powerfully humble and humbling novel, consistently crossing the crumbling boundaries of autobiography and fiction, Francoise Fautrel generously re-imagines the shocking experiences of her young survivor heroine, Clara, without ever relegating her to a position of victim. Written with the hindsight of a street-smart child, this book is an open gesture to anyone who has felt broken yet directed by a drumming desire to create new conditions for a dignified life.

Independent Writer - Maria Petrides

Υπεράνθρωποι

Ένας τρόπος με τον οποίο χαρακτηρίζεται η μεταμοντέρνα ταυτότητα, είναι μέσω του υψηλού libido, του οποίου η εκρηκτική και απελευθερωτική ενέργεια επεκτείνεται, οδηγώντας σε ένα ευκίνητο τόπο, όπου η ταυτότητα γίνεται μη-ταυτότητα. Στη δουλειά του Γιάννη Βαρελά αυτή η εύπλαστη ‘ταυτότητα’ μοιάζει να αποδομείται συνεχώς. Τα εντυπωσιακά κολάζ-σχέδιά του απεικονίζουν υπερμεγέθεις χαρακτήρες (με ένα, άν θέλετε, Νιτσε-ακό τρόπο του Ubermensch όπου ο άνθρωπος είναι παντοδύναμος/υπεράνθρωπος), των οποίων το φύλο παραμένει ακαθόριστο. Στα έργα του η δυναμικότητα και η υπερβολική αρρενωπότητα συνυπάρχουν με το εύθραυστο, η επιβλητικότητα με τη σεμνότητα. Και ενώ η ακριβής κάθετη γεωμετρία της δουλειάς του υποδηλώνει μια ισχυρή σύνθεση (όπως ένα υψηλό αστικό κτίριο), συγχρόνως αυτοαναιρείται με ένα ανάλαφρο αλλά υπονομευτικό τρόπο.

Ένα από τα τρία σχέδια του Βαρελά, τα οποία εκτίθενται τώρα στην 1η μπιενάλε της Αθήνας, σφίζει από πολιτισμικούς συνειρμούς, χριστιανικά σύμβολα, σεξουαλικά υπονοούμενα και μυθολογικές αναφορές. Στη βάση του υπεράνθρωπου, εκεί που ‘κανονικά’ θα ήταν τα πόδια, υπάρχει ένα κολάζ που απεικονίζει ένα Βαυαρό βασιλιά, και ακριβώς από πάνω, σε ένα δεύτερο κολάζ υπάρχει η μαρμάρινη εκδοχή του χριστού της καθολικής εκκλησίας. Συνεχίζοντας ανοδικά την παρατήρηση του σχεδίου, συναντούμε ένα Ελληνικό ξωκκλήσι του 14 αιώνα (σε ένα τρίτο κολάζ). θα μπορούσαμε να πούμε ότι παρακολουθούμε μία ιστορική-δημιουργική εξέλιξη. Και στη συνέχεια καταλείγουμε σε ένα σύγχρονο τοπίο του φαντασιακού, όπου το αφηρημένο και το διακοσμητικό συναντιούνται προσωρινά. Αυτή η μεταμόρφωση λειτουργεί ως η σπονδυλική στήλη της γιγαντιαίας φιγούρας που ενώ την στηρίζει, συγχρόνως τη μεταλλάσει και συνεπαγόμενα ολόκληρη τη σύνθεση – πιθανώς ένα σχόλιο για την αλληλοεξαρτώμενη σχέση του ατόμου με την ιστορία του.

Στο δεύτερο σχέδιο ο Βαρελάς αφαιρώντας τις όψεις ενός διαμερίσματος από το περιβάλλον τους, τις συναρμολογεί σε μία μορφή. Ένα πρόσωπο που προσωρινά προσδιορίζεται από το πιο χαρακτηριστικό αρχιτεκτονικό στοιχείο μιας πόλης -ίσως και της Αθήνας-, τις πολυκατοικίες της.
Ταυτόχρονη αποδόμηση και αναδόμηση. Μία διακριτική σύνθεση όπου τα μάτια κοιτάζουν ένα ευμετάβλητο και οριζόντιο τοπίο πόλης, ενώ στην απτή κατασκευή του διαμερίσματος προσδίδονται εύκαμπτες, ανθρωπομορφικές ιδιότητες. Είναι μία αδιόρατη έκκληση για ένα πιο ανθρώπινο Αθηναικό τοπίο, για την τροποποίηση της τωρινής ταυτότητας ώστε να αρχίσει να υλοποιείται μία καινούργια Αθήνα;



Μαρία Πετρίδη (συγγραφέας & υποψήφια Διδάκτωρ UCL)
Δημοσίευση στο Υ.Γ τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2007

Passing sanctuaries in the life of a Palimpolis

Demetris Neokleous’ work never ceases to surprise its viewer. From the materials he chooses to work with, comics and photographs, the vibrant installations he constructs, to his humourous videos - verging on the grotesque, in a Paul McCarthyist vein of the artist emptying himself of public appeal - like the 2001 scatological study in Happening “Manure”, Neokleous makes sure that any intimation of a ‘peripheral’ art is ebbed away by actively placing it in the forefront. The settings and conditions for his works are important media for mobilization, just as the materials selected are valuable signifiers, pregnant with social-economic and political meanings patiently awaiting activation by participant/citizens.

Light and fun, colourful and rhythmical, supple and shifting, mobile and mobilizing, Neokleous’ work, since 2000, has marked a new territory in the art scene of Cyprus. Co-founder of the NGO artist run space, Stoa Aeschylous, and co-organizer of the international artists network, Noise of Coincidence, Demetris Neokleous belongs to the zeitgeist of the mid decade of the 21st century, when artists began to transform the functions and roles of galleries and curators by interfering with existing spaces, while reconstructing new ones intended to generate talk, at times a differing one, and to avoid living on any manipulated margin outside the mainstream art world.

In 2002, the smallest exhibition space in New York, two and a half square feet Wrong Gallery, in a posh-looking glass door, greeted its visitors with a brusque sign saying, “Fuck Off We’re Closed”. Non-commercial and accessible only to window shoppers, Wrong Gallery, located itself in the heart of the Chelsea white cubes it mocked. An art-world entertainer turned gallerist/curator, Maurizio Cattelan, and two editors turned curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick, paved the way for fresh means of critiquing the mainstream from within it, escaping therefore, marginalization.

In an age of a collapsing globalism, Stoa Aeschylous, preserves the artist’s turned gallerist’s vision to host both local and international artists. A former ‘shopping arcade’, as its given Greek name, Στοα, also suggests, it promotes a transforming character of art shows developing in an age of ethical, cultural, intellectual and financial insecurity. Demetris Neokleous’ work addresses the issue of what it means to be mobile in an age of economic disaster. How might seeking for alternative refuges release the hostile political environment that surrounds his local, Cyprus? Sharp in his critique towards a social and material complacency, which dictates the daily lives of people, and consequently, festers apathy, he creates passing sanctuaries, beginning from the ones we each carry within and without us: our histories, personal and political.

Amusingly, although variable in the media Neokleous chooses to work with, a quality of magic, of the powerful, if you will, appears consistently in altered forms. Dating back to 2003, Worms, a series of oil on canvas, energetic in colour and Renaissance in detail, resemble flying magical carpets landing in a still white gallery. The same year, he creates, Camouflage, an installation of patchwork fabrics covering what look like tunnel tents from which one can view the outside world. Tents, sleeping bags and jackets in Neokleous’ work are like articles of faith one holds firmly to, and being loyal to, must make space for them to be inhabited. This fascinating installation, Camouflage, is self-transforming, and a shaper of its environment.

While Faith Ringgold’s celebrated 1970s painted story quilts create narratives of oppressed African-Americans in ways which weave forgotten history into the existing dominant one, Tracey Emin’s 1990s piece, Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963-1995, also known as, The Tent, rejoiced the history of personal pleasures and tender gestures of cuddling up. Departing from this spirit, Demetris Neokleous’ tents, their quirky titles notwithstanding - Car-tent, a glossy self-contained Opportunist’s Tent, a cello case Passion Tent - are functional, individual and communal. Yet, some are overly adorned with lace and muslin, indicating the economic strata, which also emerge in ‘tent-life’.

Mobile and ephemerally made tents carried on one's shoulders like a backpack, transform into easily transportable sleeping bag shelters, which shift size according to demand. Since 2004, his work has featured sleeping bags, as both a metaphor for creating, wherever we are, new localities and histories, utopian and not, as well as a useful asset to mobilize rather than ‘have’ in an escalating time of economic emergency. His installation, The white jacket with red sleeping bag (2009) hints at a kind of un-human form, like a performer of magic drawing out his hidden white doves from metres of blood red material, an umbilical cord attached to innovative moments of living. Interestingly, locations become signifiers of untainted spaces where the freedom to diverge encourages growth and not conflict.

Adapting to each social context as we might find appropriate, we’re invited to ‘unload’ our shelter home. Each irreplaceable story, which unfolds from any given sleeping bag, bears, without ever possessing, its own history. As with all Demetris Neokleous’ work, it foresees an arbitrariness, which, in a post-neurotic and lethargic Cyprus, can maximize moments of celebrating everydayness. Utopian and not, a sort of urban anti-polis imagined, as his latest paintings suggest in Palimpolis (2010). These paintings, painstakingly thorough, almost in illustration fashion, spurt exorbitant paint, reflective, in some way, of their own medium and meanings. Wall paintings, but also oil and canvas, tease us with motion, colour, detail, and mixed metaphors. As, for example, one of his Untitled, which offers us little human figures suspended, on the one hand, by strings maneuvered by the “invisible” mechanisms of a city’s production, while, on the other, holding strings in a spirit of human unity, these beings float euphorically from the heights of the same anti-city.

Most of Demetris Neokleous’ work formulated in 2010 hubs around this tension between what it means to share historical events without clinging to harsh and habitual narratives. These light tents and sleeping bags become places where stories and histories unfurl. A safe haven far removed from a “house” attached to territorial possession, but a shifting one, always a work-in-progress, influenced by other histories, while inspiring next generations. The family sleeping bag (2010) anticipates an invention of citizens whose own tales will join past narrative moments, as the bags, themselves, link. Demetris Neokleous, therefore, offers a kind of utopian landscape free from oppressions and possessions, which we can foster, right now, for the following inhabitants. Wherever freedom matters, we live, and wherever we live, we are free.

Panayiotis Michael

Ουρανέ, όχι δεν θα πω το ναι









At your own expense, buy a dream, watch it ‘mature’, ‘degenerate’, ‘collapse’, and ‘reconstruct’ itself. Who sells dreams today? Do we live them? Can we afford our dreams in a time of recession? We dream often, while awake or asleep, and feel immense pleasure by the experience itself. The material activity of dreams seems to work on second levels of interpretation. What if one were to dream of wanting to live in a world where communication, social happiness, and generous gesturing do not emanate from other motives? Does the process of activating this dream shrivel its vision, alienating the dreamer, since even dreams are evaluated by individual achievement? What is in a dream?

Moving ‘through’ Panayiotis Michael’s latest work, Ουρανέ, όχι δεν θα πω το ναι* (Hey Sky, No I Won’t Say Yes), the viewer enjoys the layers of materials and meanings. Panayiotis Michael composes the works using adverts from real estate company catalogues, cutting and cropping them to then edit and reconstruct them in a different setting. Drawings from architectural books are altered, just as our reality is when penetrated by social conventions and symbols. Negotiating the phenomenon of a constructed ‘reality’, product of a society that promises us ‘homes’/dreams, Panayiotis Michael seeks to reveal an aspect of the complex process whereby contemporary realities are created.

The private and the personal merge in a space, both inside and out, verging on the in-between. If a ‘house’ is also a space to inhabit one’s body, it is also the same place from which one must escape to re-create one’s daydreams of new possibilities, and even one’s notion of the ‘self’. Being inside and out of a body, a ‘home’, a society, is, to stand on a fertile ground, shifting ideals, transforming beliefs and regenerating dreams. Can this ‘home’ be inhabited? Is the ‘home’ a dream which can be re-imagined? A dream, one might say, which can help us dream better. Felix Gonzales-Torres has voiced how ‘theory [dreams] should make us live better by trying to show us certain ways of constructing reality'.1 To dream of social happiness and a flourishing generosity is to pave the way for a new reality.

Panayiotis Michael’s project is a shifter of space, images, time, illusions, memories and fears. It places notions of ‘security’ and ‘rivalry’, ‘daydream’ and ‘reality’, the ‘personal and the global’, ‘invention/destruction’ in in-between stages. Just as the cut-outs move around in the drawing, pushing the ‘frame’ from its limits, Stand-Home-Stand, a video animation on a loop, stretches our expectations of what a ‘house’ encompasses. Hypnotic in its glossy enter-ings and levelling exits, this imagined ‘house’ hardly prevails, suggesting that we re-invent the contents of happiness.

As Amerigo Nutolo has observed, ‘Panayiotis Michael’s social and political vision permeates his style perfectly. Trapped inside itself, it is totally uninhabitable. His house becomes an empty emblem in expectation of some sign of private life, of hospitality and of the constant attempt to extend the space’.2

* The title is borrowed from a very popular Greek song of the 1980’s, whose lyrics are written by Nicos Gatsos, and music by composer, Manos Hatzidakis.

1. Interview with Felix Gonzalez-Torres by Robert Storr, ArtPress, January 1995. http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixInterv.html
2. Fuori-Nonluogo. 3 topografie poetiche della Submodernita – Torino 25 Settembre 2009. Catalogue published for the exhibition.

Alkis Hadjiandreou

See my desire. Break through yours.


‘There is nothing simpler and more human than to desire’. (‘Desiring’ in Profanations, Giorgio Agamben)


There are lots of places where one can adopt various personae and make them public: a space and place where an individual can both project her/his image/persona and protect it from being ‘touched’ or harassed. Websites like You-tube and Facebook allow and encourage users to create profiles, to upload videos, to make friends, and to interact in a social setting where dialogue can thrive.
In this project, however, artist and architect, Alkis Hadjiandreou experiments with the possibilities flourishing in an interactive sex site called ‘X-Tube’. It is a site where the boundaries of ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ are deliberately blurred. X-Tube affirms the ‘reality of this website’. The users create a persona through their videos, photos and public profiles. They do so through choosing their own usernames. By doing this they interact with others in a way that the ‘real’, ‘material’ and ‘virtual’ come closer, creating a new post-cyber reality.
Here, the ‘real’ is, at once, material and virtual. And the persona of each user is at once material and image. It must be mentioned that all the images captured from X-Tube have been borrowed from the Users with their permission.
By the use of either stills or videos, on You-Tube and Facebook, one can merely make some form of documentation or (un)intentional commentary on a ‘reality’. By ‘reality’ I mean the space which is activated by a physical and material presence attached to an identity, which is constructed and, by extension, deconstructed by our social environment.
Interestingly, unlike the above mentioned connectors, X-Tube, precisely because of the boldness of its content, breaks through the screen which protects the ‘user’ from the ‘viewer’. The ‘user’ is, however, both performer and viewer, in so far as they articulate and initiate their desires. These naked desires are deliberately made visible, and the ‘user’ fearlessly performs her/his vulnerabilities. They reach out to the voyeurist ‘viewer’ to show him/her how unprotected and threatened s/he is by not having broken through the screen. The ‘user’ bravely contests the ‘viewer’ to transgress the shield which disguises ‘unreal’ desires and the appearance of them.
Alkis Hadjiandreou’s concept took off from several poetic and potent observations Giorgio Agamben makes in a four-paragraph essay on ‘Desiring’. He writes,
'to communicate one’s desires to someone without images is brutal. To communicate one’s images without one’s desires is tedious (like recounting one’s dreams or one’s travels). But both of these are easy to do. To communicate the imagined desires and the desired images, on the other hand, is a more difficult task’ (53).

This project takes on the challenge to show how Users on X-Tube pass on their story bound desires and desired images by daring the viewer to allow their own imagined desires to be articulated. “Viewer, what would your desire look like, if you let it see?” As a ‘viewer’, Alkis Hadjiandreou’s interested in showing how it is possible to communicate dreamt desires by releasing craved images. Bodies, in these images, are manipulated as much as they are manipulators.
In this project, Alkis Hadjiandreou's photographs instant shots from the Users’ videos. He uses the material provided by the Users’ images and videos to create ‘portraits’. He photographs personae and not ‘bodies’. Dreamy bodies, in this project, are saturated with awkward fantasies, tender tension and films of interruptions. The actual body, here, is the skin of this site, which offers Users the space to be real and imagined; at once, desired performer and controlling object.
The body in any given image is doubly manipulated. Bodies are controlled by unleashed desires. At another level, the images of these bodies are employed in different ways. Settings are altered; periods seem to be changing; forms are warped; figures are misrepresented; screens are unsaved. Each still shot is manipulated by superimposition, keeping in the forefront, however, the colour and texture of each User’s aura in the video. Although zooming close to the Users’ videos, the frame around the image is inevitably captured: the cursor, the symbols of play and download, the streaming window, the screen itself, the titles of the videos, etc.
And just as the excess of desires and their images cannot be contained, the videos here cannot keep the ‘instructions’ on how to play, outside the frame. No image is above suspicion. Desire oozes both within and without the frame. Images of expressed desires resist confinement, and this is meant to be seen.

Panikos Tembriotis

Tribus Hyba

Panikos Tembriotis’ latest work, inventive and sarcastic, creates the conditions for a pleasurable lunge into the modern human’s unconsciousness. His displayed sculptures impress at a very first glimpse. Naked humanistic bodies pose in various muscular positions, resembling motions of another type of animal.

At first sight, the effect seems both dazzling and fused. At a closer look, however, these figures appear as reflections of a modern human’s psyche, which, having ignored the intellectual dimension of her/his existence, is consumed by various activities, unconsciously incited by an impulse to search for meaning. Paradoxically, the result is equally humorous, as it is sarcastic, since, in an attempt to affirm their superiority over the animal species, these hybrid bodies disclose aspects of their being, which demonstrate their apparent relationship to animals, one they sometimes ignore, and at other times, try significantly to conceal. In the end, what remains is nothing but an echoing absence of existential meaning, as might be the case for the contemporary individual.

As with much of Panikos Tembriotis’ work, the issues of identity construction, individual consumption versus social happiness, superheroic idolatry, and the artist in relation to her/his political make-up, are engaged with here. Life-size mannequins adorned in wooden extensions of fruit, fish, and black crows, metamorphize into physically challenged skiers and roller bladders. Here, we have the merging of an animalistic innateness to survive and a contemporary paranoia of the artist/human to be super-human.

We could ski along with the alien/robotic-looking black mannequin with pink horns, and a spinal cord formed by, what looks like, two bloody egg-shaped hearts. Half skiing and half swimming, as the diver’s fin worn on the left foot suggests. Or we could inflame the very ‘foreigner’/mannequin/individual, who seems to be aloof about her/his own alterity, like the black crow, whose awkward site on the cross sculptures, makes it difficult for us to imagine that it could be ruled out from the tribe. It is necessary that it/she/he has a place in its identities and that they belong to the tribe.

As the title of Panikos Tembriotis’ project of the last two years suggests, the hybrid tribe is not a utopian space, be it imaginary or three-dimensional, but a real topos of clans, animal, human and humanoid, in which we all live interdependently. We are hybrid in our identities and in the ways that we believe, think, behave and perform. For every other individual, community, country, that we come to touch, we give and take something from this cross-ing of civilizing stimulus.

Tembriotis’ glossy and plastic kitsch dummies give off relevant propositions in the way that they make reference to their self-created distortions through a firm aura. If Tembriotis’ film, Helen, commemorates some form of unification of fragmented communities, and My wife threw me out, honours a world in which alternative communities may develop from within a globalized era, Tribus Hyba celebrates physical and conscious alterities in a world growing more and more out of a three-dimensional space.

Panikos Tembriotis

my wife threw me out

My wife threw me out is an installation performed for a week in Aglantzia, a small municipality in Nicosia, Cyprus. Armed with very basic amenities - food, water, electricity, clothes, a bed - this mobile ‘home’, a white caravan, ‘secures’ a place in a public square, and artist, Panikos Tembriotis, is there to perform this imagined, or not, refuge for seven days. Might it be the birth of a camping site? A ‘homeless’ man trying to start a temporary public life? An urban ‘Berliner’ unwilling to give up on the loss of the prospect of creating new communal life in a public square?

Positioning himself in a public square puts Panikos Tembriotis at both mental and physical challenges. An exposed fantasy and an exposing gesture of realization that something has to change. Inviting passers-by to respond or partake in whichever way they desire, Panikos Tembriotis, provokes us to lay a hand on a particularly current urgency - at least in many over-indulging, capitalist societies - to join with intimate strangers, if only for an endless moment. The ‘collaborator’ might be gracious but s/he could also be hostile. Implicit is the unpredictability of the ‘community’ being created, however, the artist takes responsibility for the eventful possibilities, which he allows to be created.

Is Panikos Tembriotis’ performance-installation a tempting place where more and more people/artists, today, are looking to rest outside consumerism?
The stress induced by the gap created between consuming material and losing a sense of community spirit seems to be an inherent response to a post-globalized isolation. Is Tembriotis’ performance a re-enactment of a 'other' life, promisingly simple, sensitizing, and fulfilling? In tune with the ambivalent title, the artist holds a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, engaging his audience by showing them a picture of the ‘wife who threw him out’. This is not a morbid ‘mass-produced’ image of Andy Warhol’s Monroe, but a small single photograph of a female icon, who is inimitable and priceless. Yet, the artist seems to suggest that Monroe is a treasure to be protected from an urban and industrial, corporate art market.

And so does this gesture leave him ‘homeless’ in return? Or is it a celebration of another possible world. Over a year ago, the man who lives without money, Irishman, Mark Boyle, parked his caravan from the organization Freecycle, on an organic farm in Bristol. He is the founder of the Freeconomy Community, an online organization of 17,000 members sustaining an alternative economy during the time of a global economic crisis. My wife threw me out addresses both a personal and a social crisis, where the two are not unrelated.

In 2002, Marina Abramovic took refuge in New York’s, Sean Kelly Gallery, for twelve days. Without speaking or eating, in an oath of silence and fasting, if you will, Abramovic opened a ‘‘private’’ experience into the public, pushing, once again, the boundaries of what is uniquely human and humanizing. In the tradition of Performing art installation, where blurring the boundaries is necessary, Panikos Tembriotis agrees playfully to an open ended ideation with his audience in order to enhance a human relation engulfed in possibilities. Through performance, he establishes his own existence as an artist, via time and space. However, the installation itself explores the experience of an audience leaving space and time as object relations. Open-endingly, we may wonder, whether the ‘visibility’ of the performer’s body is important? Must the artist be ‘present’?

Panikos Tembriotis

The Last Supper


A narratological 15th century mural painting of the Christian parable, created by Leonardo da Vinci has found itself reincarnated in contemporary art. From Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper cycle (1986) to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-79), a subversive feminist iconic installation, the theme continues to excite and incite new interpretations.

The ritual meal of early Christianity, the ‘agape’ feast, was celebrated by each participant bringing his own food, bread and bloody wine, and eating it in a common room. Panikos Tembriotis’ Last Supper, an installation completed between 2003-6, offers yet another version of this narrative. The setting of the last supper comes in variations. In a procession of a kitsch-inspired decorative-framed reproduced photo of a version of The Last Supper, Mary Magdalene is implicitly present, since the desired and desiring woman is being anticipated. The all-male tale remembers that it has forgotten a crucial counterpart: a female.

Tembriotis’ installations shift, however, from ‘still’ representations, which make commentary on what’s missing in the early Christian ceremony, to a collection of real and fresh cauliflowers, offering a new and simple vegetarian ‘feast’, to wax-figures/dummies resembling children’s toys, to a decadent banquet, where bloody wine remains untouched, and, finally, The Last Supper, comes without the male bodies themselves. Twelve bright yellow raincoats hanging on a white wall behind an oblong wooden table dressed in a clean white tablecloth, with black loafers by them, suggest another reading of the ‘supper’.

Notwithstanding the parody, we wonder whether the followers of Christ are protectors or need to be protected? While a female representation is absent here, it is questionable whether a disciple is, in any conventional way, being symbolized. Invisible as they are, their ‘souls’ are identical and identifiable in what they are not wearing. An allusion, perhaps, to our prime state of becoming beings. Once again, Tembriotis’ subversive verve resides in the reconstruing of a historical narrative, in order to show how it is relevant today, precisely because cultural tales impact our own stories, and shape the way we relate to the world.

Panikos Tembriotis

Helen

This film attempts to merge George Seferis’ poem, Helen and Euripides’ tragedy Helen, as well as the history of modern Cyprus in the wider historical context of Hellenism.
On the countenance of both Helen and Teucer, the visionary and timeless work of the two creators reminds us of the struggles of latter Hellenism, which are ultimately not awarded a fair dealing.

The film incorporates archival material with dramatized and abstract frames of Helen’s and Teucers’ journey, and relates the events of the Trojan war with those of the catastrophe of Asia Minor, the struggle of Freedom in Cyprus between 1955-59, the declaration of Independence in 1960, the conflict of the two communities, and the Turkish invasion. The film doesn’t ‘return’ merely to the past but transports it to the present by making obvious how these affairs continue to have an effect on Cyprus today.

The bold reach of the director is a means by which to become problematised about the significance of the two texts in juxtaposition with the modern historical passage of Cyprus. How is it, in other words, that chronologically distant historical periods are comparable, if not because identities cross and re-congregate, therefore, making sameness unneeded and difference acknowledged.

From the far past to the very present and near future, communities have been building and collapsing. While the former Yugoslavia was ferociously dissected, and occupied Palestine continues to be brutally isolated and oppressed, there are, nevertheless, incidents of positive change, as for example, the unification of Berlin, current visions to create a single government to unite Afghanistan and Pakistan, and an ongoing plan to fully incorporate Hong Kong into China.

Identity continues to be a present day “problem”. But is it? Whether we refer to human identity, that of the individual and her/his ethical inclinations, or ethnic identity, that pertaining to the community from which we develop social behaviours, ideologies, phobias, etc, the question of “who we are” is not uncomplicated, but is it a “problem” to be resolved or a condition to be traversed?

Divided communities with similar histories, and diverse religions which have, however, matured parallel in a world of cross-cultural identities determined by fluid mobilities, can provide us with new ways of living in a world beginning to disintegrate by global warming, growing hostile by anti-democratic right-wing extremist politics, and disappearing from over-consumption in an age when natural resources are depleting.

Zurab Gulishvili

Zurab Gulishvilli’s refined work, whether we look at his drawings, collages or sculptures, embraces, in a tender and reminiscent way, never too firm, the historical and the modified, the aesthetic and the personal, the usual and the ethereal.
Georgia, where Gulishvilli was born and raised, is present, at times, in his work. However, Georgia’s history, particularly its political history, is not a subject matter, which, in any way, marks Gulishvilli’s work. On the contrary, Georgia is present only in an evocative way, pregnant with innuendos, which, at best, open keyholes and ink jar bottles to let loose other possibilities moved by a Georgian landscape, which borders on other backgrounds. The mountains of the Caucasus are between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and this site of the Caucasus is filled with traces of images. Just as the geographies and cultural influences of Russia, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijian, which surround Georgia, are strongly present in historic, present-day, and imagined Georgia. In his work, the sense of ‘belonging’ to a place and history seems to be playfully suspended. Even so, there is no remnant of bitterness or nostalgia for any cultural or political displacement suggested or experienced.



Zurab Gulishvilli’s drawings and collages often suggest an Arcadian world where dreams and real life marry. The imagery of the breathtaking mountains of the Caucasus reside in his older, and new work. From playful children’s slides, which do not seem to begin or end anywhere as is the innocence of childhood fantasy, landscapes ‘acting’ as stage props, the idolization of historical/political figures, and representations of a ‘home’, Gulishvilli consistently returns to the inspiring game of ‘locating’ where the potential of a transforming power may be looming. In these works of collage, he has collected photographs from archival magazines and manipulated them to connect possibly historic figures, and an imagined mass of ideologues. As in his collage titled, Belonging 1, the erasure of this figure’s forehead seems to understate the value of lineage here. Instead, in its foresight appears a decorative stroke. The aesthetic in Zurab Gulishvilli’s work is never side-lined. On the contrary, his aesthetic interventions on political ‘stuff’, pronounce the importance of his form without, however, jeopardizing its content.

Gracious Superhumans

If one of the many ways to think of a post-modern identity is in terms of a highly sexualized libido whose explosive and liberating energy extends fluidly, one might perceive a ‘no-identity identity’ in Jannis Varelas’ drawings. Using pencil and gouache, his impressive collage-drawings are often larger-than-life depictions of individual figures (an oberman in the Nietzschean sense in which ‘man’ is all-powerful) whose gender ambiguity is probably one of the least inflated elements in his work. Varelas’ drawings are muscular and brittle, unassuming and arresting. At the same time that the razor-sharp and tidy geometric verticality of his work suggests a powerful composition, perhaps an urban high-rise building, it also deconstructs itself in a playful yet defiant way.

One of his drawings, showing now at Athens 1st biennale, fuses cultural signifiers, christian symbolism, sexual innuendos and mythological references. At the base of Varelas’ superhuman figure is a collage of, what looks like, two ancient Greek sculptures, perhaps in the form of a caryatis or an ancient Greek column. If we ascend/climb the drawing, through the mind’s eye, from south to north, we might see a historical-creative transformation from a period roughly located B.C to what looks like a medieval era, suggested by a cathedral. Eventually, we reach a contemporary landscape of the imaginary where the abstract and decorative meet provisionally. This pictorial transformation works as the spine of the gigantic figure, as the column, which upholds him while also changing itself and the entity, as a result. A comment, perhaps, on the interrelation between the individual and his/her history.

Another of Varelas’ work points discreetly to facets of an apartment, decontexualized to fit as collage into a face. A profile that is temporarily identifiable through a city’s, Athens’ maybe, most characteristic element, namely, its apartment buildings. Each deconstructs and reconstructs the other. The individual’s eyes look onto a mobile and horizontal cityscape while the concrete construction of an apartment takes on malleable and anthropomorphic features. Is this an understated appeal to humanize Athens’ cityscape? A sensitive gesture towards creating a minimal façade by altering its current identity in order to realize a new Athens?

September 2007
appeared in ΥΓ of Phileleftheros newspaper

Dis-Playing – a game on playing and its unravelling

Dis-Playing – a game on playing and its unravelling is a play on seeing the seriousness of what lies inside the outer layer, behind the frontal/face, the game, if you like. In fact, to ‘dis-play is to bring something to play; to make it both subject and object, as that which subliminally imposes itself, and whose material offers itself for consumption, visual or real.

The project Dis-Playing, as conceived by artist, Panayiotis Michael, involves 8-9 art students who have been given guidelines to create an artwork, which may then be installed in the display windows of various shops on the road of Ονασαγόρου, in old Nicosia. Some of these shops no longer function as small businesses, and so one of the challenges for the students is to create works, which may, or not, inhabit these spaces. An interesting point to make about this area is that it falls in a part of Nicosia’s green line, and so this raises questions to do with the geographic and historic nature of the area in which these desolated stores stand. By whom were these small enterprises run? Why did they close down? What kind of shops were they? How did they display their windows? These alternative spaces – and I call them alternative as they may be experienced by art students who are planning to show their work in a temporary “exhibition” space – offer their own histories, whether through the students’ abilities to imagine them as they were in the past, or to envision them as future constructions.

Each individual has his/her own ideas about shopping, window displays and forms of consumerism. The concept of this project puts the students in a situation to imagine themselves as both the consumer and owner, the object and subject, the outside browser and the inside trend-setter. So the relationship between the artist and his/her product, the student and his/her work is related, in ways, to that of the entrepreneur and the consumer. The artist/student has an audience to consider, and in many cases, a potential collector/viewer.

There is a semiological setting that attracts a viewer when strolling by a shop window and the invitation for these students is to install works that develop an exchange between the inside and the out.

We have only to imagine how long it might take someone to walk several blocks on New York City’s 5th avenue. Glamorous designer stores; children’s toyshops; chocolate boutiques; sensational perfume houses, and art galleries, are all encoded with hidden messages, which allure browsers passing by. Dis-Playing, might then, be seen as an experiment on how viewers might respond to storefronts that house art rather than particular products designed for quick consumption. How might we imagine Ονασαγόρου street to look after the project Dis-Playing is installed? We await with anticipation!

November 2007
appeared in ΥΓ of Phileleftheros newspaper

Bruce Nauman says it again!

One might expect to find that the viewers promenading the Turbine Hall occasionally taking a look at the closest half-smiling face were part of Bruce Nauman’s latest work, Raw Materials. This is, after all, the first non-visual installation to be mounted in the vast space, so one could be wondering “where the art is”. It is in 22 recordings of texts, in an audio composition of fragments emitted from speakers sealed into the glass and steel skeleton walls that interact with the museum space, and the public.

In October 2002, the third commissioned artist of The Unilever Series, Anish Kapoor, filled the former power station, in width and in length, with a red malleable sculpture stretching across it. In October 2003, Olafur Eliasson’s spectacular Weather Project transformed the entire space, but more importantly, the artificial mist permeating the air and the yolk sun rising out of the haze to illuminate the refigured ceilings, altered the room’s temperature and the viewer’s perception.
Nauman had to do it differently. We have, since the sixties, seen countless videos in which he records himself performing in his New Mexico studio, and we have watched how his physical body is stifled by his polyphonic mastery. But we had yet to see Nauman dismantle works that bridge 40 years of his career, and present these disembodied voices in a symphony of cacophony and rhythms.

As the loyal viewer pauses to rub her/his ear against a speaker hoping to isolate each text, voices from the centre of the hall are discharged. Nauman’s shrilling voice anxiously recites a children’s tale in various tones: at first he is flippant, then, didactic; he becomes angry and later frustrated. This recording welcomes endless play, suggesting how repetition may beget meaning by one capturing the echoes of words. ‘Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence and Pete fell off who was left? Repeat!’ Each time it is sung in a characteristic style, inviting us to respond to every tone for different interpretations of the same words. However, the speed of this tale accelerates as the recording continues, and this hastiness, the kind that computer images make us aware of, challenges us to keep up with its tempo if we care to make “sense” of it.

‘OK OK OK’, Nauman repeats these words until they become blurry and appear to take on another sound, another signifier. Like Samuel Beckett’s Krapp, Nauman’s insistence on repetition verges on the absurd, the compulsive, and the revealing. If Krapp (re)listens incessantly to fragments recorded from his remote past, Nauman (re)forms these once polished texts from different contexts – some from prints, others from sculptures – to suggest new meanings.

Unlike Bourgeois, Muñoz, Kapoor, and Eliasson, Nauman employs the absence of the visual and the aura of the empty raw hall, to create a work that borders on language, sound and installation. Raw Materials is an archival piece that saturates the Turbine with a mass of voices chiming the written word, reassuring the viewer–listener that ambiguity is a virtue and disjointedness a reality.

October 2004
Winner of prize for the Writing Review competition of University College, London