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.

Ομάδα Πέντε - χωρογραφία Ρούλα Κλεοβούλου

Tender Genders



catching and falling

When i peep through the bedroom doors and no one is there, i fall.
When i look out for the stars in the morning and they're not there, i fall.
Each time you cry, i fall.
When i learn that the earth is round after experiencing it flat, i fall.
When brittle leaves fall from the tree, i fall.
When you build a wall, i fall.
When you're on the other side, i fall.
If i have cramps, i fall.
After i discover that i’m not someone else, i fall.
When you stumble, i fall.
When the sun cracks the day, i fall.
If i forget my name, i fall.
When you don’t catch me, i fall.






Tender Genders


i feel

- i feel…
- sulky.
- i feel…
- confused.
- i feel…
- aloofness.
- i feel…
- neglected, frustrated, enraged…
- i feel enraged…
- Feverish and deserted…
- i feel deleted, lost.
- Washed out?
- i feel your chapter is being completed, without me.
- excluded?
- i feel i’m a forgotten footnote, unmentioned.
- remembered.
- i feel… i feed you… with language.
You make no reference to my being,
yesterday, last year or eight years ago.
- i feel…
- wordy.
- i feel your absence.
You’re imagined absence is there, everywhere and nowhere.
And I am real and I am here!


i'm sorry

i would have loved to have said, i’m sorry, before, but my tongue twisted.
i’m sorry for not having been sorry yesterday, the day before, last year.
i’m sorry for not being at the airport waiting for you on that stormy December evening.
i’m sorry for not telling you why i wasn’t there.
i’m sorry for not looking back at you after you went away.
i’m sorry for forgetting that your eyes are the colour of a sheer sky.
i’m sorry for not loving your pain away.
i’m sorry that your pain is living and i’m not giving...
i’m sorry for recalling those moments of shallow silence.
i’m sorry that i’m no longer mourning you.
i’m sorry that i’m sorry.
But i am sorry now.

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.

Anna Lascari

Pink



Heard in the Dark

We can never see past the choices we don’t understand – The Oracle, The Matrix

Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings – Samuel Beckett

Describing Company (1979), one of Samuel Beckett’s later and less known prose pieces, the scholar Dirk Van Hulle notes: ‘Beckett started writing Company in May 1977. In August the actor David Warrilow asked Beckett if he wanted to write a play for him; on the first of October Beckett wrote a letter to Warrilow suggesting a central theme: “My birth was my death”, emphasizing the undeniable fact that each person happens to be born at the very moment his process of dying begins’. 1 Indeed, in the text that Beckett finally published, opposites do not merely coexist but also influence one another: the temporal distance between birth and death evaporates; binaries of expressed life are nullified, and the cycle of being resembles an exploding star. This way, the equation of two borderline situations, which takes place in the mind of an elderly man who anguishly tries to relate to images from his past, constitutes a metaphor for the power of the imagination but also a critical inquiry on the phenomenology of perception and the awareness of the senses.

Like most of Samuel Beckett’s works, Company goes beyond the concerns of the period in which it was written, posing fundamental questions which marked the philosophical thought of the 20th century and continue to hold a leading place in today’s theoretical discourse. Anna Lascari’s latest exhibition mirrors some of the surrounding conceptual themes we find in Company, as well as in the texts of, among others, Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which complement and recontextualize Beckett’s prose piece. Adopting the introspective outlook of a creator who gives particular attention to the formation and function of images, Lascari examines the personal experience of time in relation to the concept of duration. This is why her exhibition, with the Beckettian title PINK, is set in a way that makes the viewer feel as if s/he is traveling through time. 2

The first stop – or the ‘prelude’, to use a musical term – of this journey is a series of drawings depicting images and symbols seemingly unconnected. However, in a closer reading, one discerns an inner rhythm and a concordant conversation in each composition – a “phenomenological melodiousness,” as Lascari accurately observes. These drawings resemble bizarre music scores which decelerate the gaze of the viewer – hence, the title Speed Down – by challenging her/his knowledge and imagination. Here, no image is “innocent” or devoid of reference. The bench, for instance, does not only symbolize the wisdom and mastering of time, but brings to mind images, mainly from popular movies or photographs, in which the protagonists - like Forrest Gump, the Prophet in Matrix, or the writer Jorge Luis Borges - have influenced our perception of time and “the journey of life”. In a similar manner, the image of Wonder Woman makes reference to Dara Birnbaum’s classic video; the butterflies to Vladimir Nabokov; Superman and the children’s swimming floats to Jeff Koons, while the red arrows and text allude to the subject matter of Ed Ruscha. In this play of memory transference, the most characteristic example is, perhaps, the sugar cube, which explicitly refers to philosopher, Henri Bergson’s illustrious metaphor of the notion of duration. In other words, the enigmatic iconography of Lascari’s drawings demonstrates how time is both an inconceivable paradox and a regulating principle which, commonly, through recollection, defines all aspects of our existence.

The second resting place of the passage is Three Songs: a three-part installation consisting of the homonymous structure, a goose made of plaster called Dorothy, which caws every three seconds, and a curious ticking Clock in the form of an arrow, as seen on the upper half of the drawings. If the sounds of Dorothy and the Clock provide the tempo of the viewer’s movement in the exhibition space, the imposing structure forms a space with an “emphatic closure,” according to Lascari’s description. While loitering in the four rooms of this black monolithic structure, the viewer is confronted with rapturous gazes of death and, consequently, birth. Reminiscent of the heroes of modernist epic novels, the fundamental theme here is self-consciousness. Lascari creates a setting, awakening for the senses. It’s no exaggeration to say that it “converses” with the last scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an old man is transformed, under the shadow of a monolith, into a newborn baby. Moreover, the bouquet of amaryllis – a symbol of beauty, pride, and determination – and the word Wings, which adorn the upper part of the structure, lend the piece an unreal dimension, equally anguished and morose. From what we have seen so far, the installation’s third song is nothing but a performative call: the ideal home of the Last Man. In this tomb-like construction, where the viewer can address her/his idol and hear in the dark a little voice whispering “hold on tightly, let go lightly”, the individual self dies only to be reborn in the form of a multitude, a scattered memory from the past: “…In the midst of a tumultuous crowd of people on foot constantly moving: there was, he said, a heavy traffic, a coming and going that did not calm down at night, as though every single person were always outside, drawn by the pleasure of circulating without hindrance, of being part of a crowd and then losing himself in an even larger crowd. He became exhilarated at this memory.”

By the end of Lascari’s proposed journey, whether listening to Beckett or Blanchot, the spectators are transformed into heroes of an inventive narration which makes their relationship with time - and its understanding - less remorseful than it was in the beginning.

Christopher Marinos
Art historian - Curator

Translated by Maria Petrides


1. http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5886

2. Maurice Blanchot, The Last Man, trans. Lydia Davis, Ubu Editions, 1987, p. 31.

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.

Under the Moon

Three thousand habitable planets in the known universe, and I’m stuck on the only one without much oxygen.
En-closed by acres of unexploited, uneven, and protected land, dried yellowing leaves, brittle and crumbling, swing from the resin edges of wrinkled branches. Left side and right, Lover Trees, the camouflaging colour of amber, between yellow and brown, surprise and promise, have thick and open branches. Like gracious giants holding out tiny living bugs to blow oxygen in them - the weight of their puff crushing them. Their oxygen saves and smothers. Can these oversized creatures save them from their own natural make-up? A Lover Tree at once a disappearing ant lugging his shelter to his colony!

The sun set on September 21st, 2020.
No signs suggest that human life inhabits this removed spot on the universe. The only dwellers on this hilly terrain are passing birds, breathing trees and breeding creatures.
An intervention is called upon.
On this virgin earth, an oblong graveyard, a stage, emerges, the soil unfertilized, invisible tombs in white pebbles, outline their hollow places. The graveyard is large enough to house five parked trucks, instead…

The stage, and its surroundings, is almost bare.
Stones, goggles, flags, twigs, posts, binoculars, naked bodies, a moon.
Had any human trekked around here before us?
Maybe some life-form could draw this hiding-place
away from civilization’s contents.
It’s an experiment.
How long will this secret survive its own surface?
Lonely insects below and untouchable birds above.
In-between, no humans, no humanoids?
Above rumbles a dense and vaporous sky,
brick and cream,
gripping the beat of birds slithering through it.
No life is threatened, if it rains or not.
The moon coils.
It’s an experiment.

it hosts five bodies. Three female and two male dancers cross into defined craters, trembling horizontally and engulfing the white open-air with their flaming flesh uncovered. A stage to perform a frenzied death under the meek light of an encircling moon. Oval stones, grains of sand, falling leaves, the size of an eagle’s wings.

Tension lingers. Will the white and grey birds meet half-way with the creatures crawling on this land? Is something on the verge of becoming? The wind is a feather, gliding side to side, barely brushing the ground and flying high again. It whirls between what is here, visible, or not, and not quite there. Faint. Perhaps. The moon is at its fullest. Light seeps onto the stage. It falls like the velvet curtain of a stage first being drawn to bring the audience into the show.
Two clear boxes with thirty pairs of binoculars and oxygen masks divide the audience from the stage. Spiky twigs wrapped in cellophane sketch the stage in these words:
Welcome to the theatre of raging dance. Please do not remove any of these letters from around the stage. They are here to protect our craters from being infiltrated by any kind of species. Living things-humans-androids- humanoids. Please take a pair of binoculars and an oxygen mask. Welcome to the land of the free, and the edgy, and the naked.
Around this open graveyard, a beaming audience kneels in a semi-circle. Thirty people hover over a stage, with eyes penetrating and bodies twitching in anticipation. One by one they take an oxygen mask, and binoculars.
At the far left corner of the stage, two round flags, eight feet high and upright, pose mightily on their black posts, confronting each other. There are three circles of colours in both flags. White spot, flesh dot, dark tan blotch. In the white spot of the flag positioned at the very end of the stage, seven little words are kept from the audience.
H – E – L – P… THIS FLAG HAS SKIN. IT BREATHES.
Only through binoculars or under blinding white light do these words begin to come alive.
A malleable door separates the flags. A white nylon gate covered in tiny holes, opens to the audience. The stage fades, behind it. Ahead, language begins.

Moving, watch us, waiting, scared, have fun, dress yourself, lights on, laughing, fiddling fingers, whispering neighbours, shut the boxes, hold hands, talk to us, engine on full speed, tickle society. We are here.

Like rabbits bouncing from their hidden holes and peeping into a new-found world, dancers leap out of their shallow gaps. Naked, they stand. Contours and colours of bodies are discernible under the engorging moonlight. Black glass goggles for eyes, and wet towels wringed with glistening sweat wrap around their necks. From right to left,
dancer with olive green towel…chestnut skin, firm arms and legs
amber towelled dancer…pink skin, peach-sized breasts and a pinched stomach
dancer white…pale and petite, playful, her hair tied in a pink fish-net
sapphire towel D…tall, black, bony and beer-bellied
iridescent red towel…loose dark brown hair and square shoulders

Mouths gape. One foot and a half above and in front of their craters, the performers point to their organs, one by one, miming their names with their lips.
Heart on knee, lungs pushing, liver hiding, head in hands, toe wiggling, vagina thrusting, shoulder jolting, spine crawling, fingers drumming, testicles swelling...
Mouths gape again.

Her arms folded around her knees, Amber towelled dancer crouches by Dancer with olive green towel. ‘Go. Start. Go’, she yelps. The first sounds heard on stage come from a human voice. Her mouth still deep open, her goggles follow his footprints in the soil. From his crater he pulls a plastic container, the size of an individual lunch box. Out fall the contents…a transparent straw, two round black stones, a slender orange rope three feet long, and a red fountain pen. He prods her left goggle with the straw. Amber towelled dancer winks at him and stands up to face him. Her breasts swollen with pride indicate that they are part of her own body. He ties her feet loosely with the orange rope, rests each stone in her open palms, and with his fountain pen writes on her bare stomach, ‘let’s play death’. Her jaw wide open, he slips in the straw and breathes into it with his salivating mouth. His boiling oxygen-her suspended oxygen-dancer white’s eruptive oxygen-sapphire towel D’s horizontal oxygen-iridescent red towel’s observant oxygen? Whose oxygen is burning? Amber towelled dancer and Dancer with olive green towel freeze in this instance.

Sapphire towel D and iridescent red towel salute one another, cheek to cheek and goggle to goggle. Hips collide. Sweat drips between their foreheads falling into the crevice of red’s towelled throat. Saliva creeps from her cavernous mouth. She sighs heavily, three times in a row. Their eyes absorbed in the goggles. In a quick thrust, Sapphire towel D breaks away, shrouding himself in the perforated white nylon. Flags apart, he lays between them.
Iridescent red re-mains…cheeks in white air, goggles doubling the next dive back into her crater, without yet moving. Sapphire towel D is wearing the gate between fate, miles of estrangement from species gurgling, and style, yawning letters moving images.
H – E – L – P… THIS FLAG HAS SKIN. IT BREATHES. Like the spherical eyes of an owl at midnight, the words on the flag light up, as Sapphire towel D coils around it. The white gate between the flags is a fragile film contouring his flesh, his organs under an x-ray. Flags de-part. Skin connects. Iridescent red jumps in mid-air, then lands, aimlessly and tenderly, like an ivory quill, on the flag by Sapphire towel D. Leaning against the flag, she rests her foot on his curved head.
Flags of freedom, individual or species-national? Flags celebrating rage while the audience is enthralled in a performance of human voices? Or are they flags commemorating the divorce or union of the sexes? Sapphire and Iridescent red and Dancer white. Joined and distant. Lost and delicate planets in the universe coupling in communication and bursting in solid space.
Dancer white hops over to them. With her mouth still wide open, the goggles fastened around her head, and her white towel now a wet necklace, she rubs her soiled side against Sapphire towel D. Her body curves into his, like two embracing C’s.


Dancer white. I want to tell you something!
Sapphire towel D. Can I touch you?
Dancer white. This morning I felt like my left eye was in the back of my head.
Sapphire towel D. I picked up your binoculars when you dropped them.
Dancer white. I had two faces.
Sapphire towel D. Where is my tongue?
Dancer white. Two different places, at once, to look at.
Sapphire towel D. I can’t smell my tongue.
Dancer white. Moved back and forth all morning.
Sapphire towel D. I gave you the binoculars.
Dancer white. My binoculars fell?
Sapphire towel D. You dropped them.
Dancer white. Listen to me, please! I have something to tell…
Sapphire towel D. Can I touch your tongue? (puts his finger out to touch
Iridescent red’s face, but can’t reach her. Her foot still sleeping on his head)
Iridescent red. It was a watermelon day today. Red - round - refreshing.
Sapphire towel D. My index finger is fuzzy.
Iridescent red. The moon is a translucent watermelon. Lustrous, it grows inside a fragile coating.
Sapphire towel D. My tongue, your tongue, whose tongue?
Dancer white. My eye in the back of my head sees clearer than my right
goggle.
Sapphire towel D. Your skin is soft inside, like fresh honey. Outside you’re as
unbending as a bee’s nest. (to Dancer white)
Iridescent red. Bouncing from day to night, from crater to crater, and planet to planet.
Sapphire towel D. Can I turn you inside out? (unlocks himself from Dancer white. Iridescent red holds onto the flag while Sapphire rises boldly to his feet, bends over to get a clear view of his crater, and with his buttocks to the audience throws off his goggles and dives into his crater.)
Iridescent red. The night is dark.
Dancer white. I want to tell you something! (she leaps over to the audience, kneeling, she peels off the pink fish-net from her head)
Sapphire towel D. I feel like tearing you apart. Can I? (bellows to Dancer white)


Amber towelled dancer and Dancer with olive green towel unfreeze from their locked moment. The straw breaks loose from their mouths and they separate, breathing their own way to their craters. Iridescent red covers herself in the white nylon gate and lays between the flags.


2009
appeared in Arteri arts magazine

The Birth of Non-Truth

Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style. (Oscar Wilde)

While Friedrich Nietzsche buried God, mourning the loss of the greatest meaning, nineteenth-century philosophy matured melancholically, having realized that there is no “objective reality”. Belief in any God implies that there is a source responsible for all questions relating to truth and morality, but once this foundation is shattered truth becomes a relativistic matter devoid of any intrinsic quality. Testing truth according to man-made hierarchies, and claiming that perception and reality are separate, has proven that truth is an imaginary vision of the mind, not a verifiable view of the world “as it is”.
If Oscar Wilde’s thought-provoking epigrams have any intention other than to tickle the nerves of our brains, it is to show how autonomous, subjective, and aesthetically satisfying style is. Truth, with the t capital, poses as vertical, objective and holistic. It pretends to have the answers to all philosophical questions to do with our relationship to “reality”. And anything that moves upright imposes hierarchy, causing the failure of democratic distribution. Style, on the other hand – whether found in a Philipp-Stark object, Graffiti, Rap music or a Hussein Chalayan overcoat, ‘Table-converting-into-a-Suitcase’ – defies the logic of “high” art, “deep” meaning, and “whole” thought.
Since Nietzsche’s prophetic affirmation of the modern fragment - the idea that we think in parts, that is, dissected, and not wholly - and Wilde’s post-modern notion of the death of the artist - the artwork as significantly autonomous and detached from its creator - we remain committed to ‘art for art’s sake’, art being independent of any truth outside the object or sign. We accept, then, that the subjective viewer attributes values.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp radicalized notions of what constitutes art. By placing a Urinal in a white-wall gallery, he overthrows the idea that two-dimensional art is an expression of craft primarily, which can, then, be judged by experts, i.e. art critics. The introduction of three-dimensional art paves the way for other possibilities, from performance and conceptual art – art that need not be “completed” – of the 1960s and ‘70s, to the installation and video art of the ‘80s and ‘90s, to the more recent art of technology, design, film-making and sculpture.
The 1890s and the ongoing 1990s tackle sobering issues, like truth, with humour. Wit is a caustic way for being radical and liberal, uncompromising and uncommitted: a wry organ of artistic regeneration. Just as ‘[Oscar Wilde’s] wit is an agent of renewal’, the re/production of images has produced a new wave of criticism through the use of humour. If Wilde’s dissident criticism of Victorian propriety unveils the hypocrisy of morality and truth, inspiring shock and awe, through our contemporary world of creativity we witness subversive attitudes at a visual level. Unlike the nineteenth century’s limited forms of critical expression, the twenty-first century expresses its resistance through various media, the most popular being computer art. Our world of technology and the internet is revolutionary for making art more visible and accessible to anyone connected with Our-New-World-Without-Borders, and we, the People and Creators, have the power to defy all sort of censorship by the democratic proliferation of this innovative art.


April 2006
appeared in ΥΓ of Phileleftheros newspaper

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

K:ITA – Friedrichshain – a haven for handfuls of Berlin-based artists?

In June of this year, 2007, Julian Ronnefeldt, a German photographer, living and working in Berlin, discovered a former Nursery school. Three floors high and over 2000 square metres of panelled workspaces, the K:ITA is buried away in 4000 square metres of woodland in the heart of one of Berlin’s developing centres, Friedrichshain. Situated between an old people’s home and a governmental administrative building, the K:ITA tempts you to discover it. Previously, in January, Julian had collaborated and helped organise The Coldstore Project. It was during this time that he came across a desolate building owned by a group of Berlin architects, whose initiative it was to revamp several of their buildings by preserving the ‘old’ style of post-war Berlin architecture while transforming them into something ‘new’. Julian grabbed this great opportunity and, from a bleak uninhabited warehouse, he created a platform for artists to work and exhibit in. Less than 6 months later, one of the owners offered him to operate the K:ITA space under the condition that the building is, once again, converted into an art centre or project.

The K:ITA (Kunstprojekt International Temporary Art) first started off with 10-12 people interested; now it is formed by, at least, 32 people. From fashion designers to photographers, visual artists to VJs, mezzo singers to computer experts, several of its members have adopted the K:ITA as both, a place to live communally and a space in which to create. Since Berlin’s critical transformation after unification in the early 1990s, it has come to be known as the European city in which an alternative art scene has been thriving. Individual quarters have been converted into artists’ residencies; off beat hair salons offer second-hand vintage clothing; chapels become exhibition spaces. But what makes the K:ITA project unique is first and foremost, the diversity of cultural background. Artists from Australia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, UK, and the US meet in Berlin’s Friedrichshain. A second interesting feature of the K:ITA is that it inhabits people with different artistic backgrounds, individuals whose impressions regarding collective space are materializing in this one-year project space. Wandering into K:ITA is a bit like cruising online, crossing cyber borders and instantaneously finding yourself in different cubicles where polyglossic encounters merge. Not unlike a university campus, here, too, you never know when you’ll bump into someone taking a stroll on the first floor. A sense of community is apparent at the K:ITA. The first thing you will see if you enter through the backside is, what looks like, an outdoor living room with vibrant couches and floral armchairs before acres of woods, where caravans secure a place for days. This is a meeting place for everyone who lives and/or works at the K:ITA, as well as for visitors. In many ways K:ITA functions as an open-house project space whose target it is to bring people together, and have fun.


SHORT TALKS WITH MEMBERS OF K:ITA:

For the 5 weeks that I stayed in Berlin, I visited the K:ITA at least once a week, on some occasions twice. At times we would give a hand to sand down, fill in holes and paint the walls white of the gallery space, located on the west wing of the building. Still work in progress, the gallery space is already housing small exhibitions, from video projections to fashion shows. The collaborators of the gallery space have by now contacted several curators from the Berlin Biennale to come view the project space.
Events vary from flower to flee markets, which take place on summer weekends in the outdoor surroundings where vendors can pay a small fee to come and set up their plant life and other belongings for sale. The artistic agenda has included a Columbian party, in which documentaries that had been filmed in Columbia were projected on a screen suspended between two tree trunks in the K:ITA forest. In early October, a festival will be running for a week. Co-organized with Luigi Totaro, the festival will include video installations, short movies and documentaries, a book launch and conference to do with art and networking, theatre work, and performances.
While spending time at K:ITA, I came to speak with several members. I was interested in hearing how some imagined K:ITA, and what they would like to see happen there within the year. These two questions were the basis for our short talks.


Athina Antoniadou:
I came to know of K:ITA when I first met Athina Antoniadou in late May at the Art-Athina fair in Athens, where her work was being represented in the booth of Argo gallery. At the time K:ITA was still in the process of forming itself; even so, hearing about it in its early stages appealed to me as a space to be observed and a story to be covered.
Two and a half months later, Athina Antoniadou is both pleased and relieved that the gallery space now looks polished and ready to exhibit work. She underlined ‘how important it is to establish a code of communication when working in a large group where each individual might have her/his own personal viewpoint in the project space, but must also respect a larger consensus which helps a space to progress harmoniously’. Asking Athina how she sees the K:ITA space, she murmured. ‘It’s a comfortable space where different artists can meet to talk and hang out in a pleasant atmosphere. In the evenings it’s a resting place to relax outdoors or to meet at the bar.

Half Phillipine and half Austrian, Iris Ramoser is a cinephile who came to Berlin four years ago with a vision to project movies, after having worked for a silent movie producer in Austria. She is currently involved in several housing projects, as they are often called in Berlin. On her way to discovering where she could realize her dream, she got connected with K:ITA, by helping with the organization and running of the space. When I asked her what she thought characterized these project spaces, she confessed enthusiastically, ‘they are about developing skills to survive differently in today’s industrialist societies. Finding other possible ways of dealing with, and circulating, money in a highly consumerist world’. Finally, with a wide smile and a tone of optimism, she added, ‘K:ITA is about making something out of nothing’.

Over breakfast one Sunday morning, just before we made our way up to K:ITA in a truck that would transport gallons of white paint and steel rods to build a counter in the bar area of K:ITA, I spoke to Julian Ronnefeldt. I asked him how he saw K:ITA developing and what he expected the group to make out of K:ITA for the year ahead of them?
This is what he said. ‘After the constructive outcome of the Coldstore project, I believed that the K:ITA project could be, in different ways, another interesting space for an art project. A place where there is equal representation and distribution of space, etc, without strict leadership. It is a space that can have multi-purposes, from experimenting with different media to diverse events and parties, to, perhaps, workshops developing in the various workspaces available.
I also asked him to what extent he thought the K:ITA project was socially or politically engaging? ‘It makes a statement by not making an assertion’, he replied in a serene smile.

K:ITA engages socially by promoting itself as a space for events and various exhibitions. It is now housing fashion parties with British-Berliners spinning house music until the morning hours. On this particular occasion, the queue had stretched its coiling tail around the nearest public phone booth in which ravenous individuals lay, legs crossed and beer in hand, lingering as the tailback shrivelled.
So, a lot is happening for those who are in Berlin looking for art venues to visit casually, to knock back a beer or two, and to hang around until Berlinesque things crop up. Visit K:ITA on Weidenweg 44-46, Friedrichshain, or cyberly at www.k-ita.de.

March 2008
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

Juggling Bricks

There is a scarlet red spot circling its way in a rectangular frozen partition that does not move, so it seems. On whichever inch of the circle’s circumference Zahraa´ imagines herself crawling, comfortably, the view hardly changes. She is a bilious bug, without prickly wings but with a mouth wide enough to suck unoccupied air, lagging behind a never-ending cord leading to the top of the fortress.

Zahraa´ stands. Alert. Ahead is a vista. Devoid of presence. This wall is tall, grey, concrete and naked, when her eyes are half closed. Once they relax, big black block letters - a signature - read: ‘prohibited area’.

She pictures an expanding landscape, airy not arid, piercing her to life. An impression of an immense light sky suddenly becoming real. As her eyes grow larger and her vision clearer into the distance, her body swells, encircling the wall she wishes to crumble.

Insulated from this side of life, the wall on the other side is made of thin air. Everything around her is hovering, but can this be real? If we were floaters on either side we’d see the missing feathers of the doves.

Zahraa’ is not there, yet. Will she ever pass over, creeping, panting, fretting? Where to - the other side? Which side is she on? If she crosses this wall, will the sky feel silky, or the sun smell balmy? Are the colours of the surroundings syrupy or are they faint like the long narrow closing of this setting, cornering her foresight?

Thick blood travels in her cheeks.

She runs without moving.

Walking.

She stumbles on a ...

gap … she falls into a

shallow silence…

then pauses.

Between her steel blue hands

and the aloof wall.

swirls a bustling bee.

An intrusion or interruption?

She doesn’t yet know.

She turns back.

Begins again.

Distance repeats itself.

Existence repeats itself.

Existence/distance, again.

She is locked in a wall

hindering her vision.

When her eyelashes touch.

A city without walls performs.

Forgotten and remembered.

Contracted bodies unfurl.

White lilies bloom under

red-lipped giggling toddlers.

Endless acres of unsullied moist land

on which to carve freedom.

The wind whirls at a supple speed,

on that side of the wall.

Her mind moves.

Walls ahead.

Walls aside.

Walls behind.

Walls beyond her.

Fall.

Her body shrivels

under the stalking wall.

Her brain now still.

Inside a vat.

Meaning.

fullness

rolls

off the wall.

Swiftly.

Without a trace.

The final number

that never gushed

out the aching mouth

of a gripped gambler.

A grave game of

meaning and escape.

The shadow of her body

projected on the grey wall.

Restricted movements

recorded on the wall.

The slower Zahraa´ moves…

walls multiply.

Like troops lining up to deter

others

from crossing over.

She crawls closer

clasping herself away

from the colossal canvas.

She stretches her frail frame.

Her shade enlarges.

Fear matures

as she struggles

to grasp her reassuring other

on that side of the wall.

Which must fall.

In her numbness,

her stiffness detects the …

ironic smell of habitual walking.

Grime sneaks between her toes.

And the sound of her half smile

(a crease in her shadow)

bounces echoless

from the wall.

As her terse voice hollers

‘freedom’

Aren’t all spaces that produce fear forbidden places in one way or another?

Is it also not true that towns and frontiers under enemy control breed terror?

Dedicated to all the Palestinian people who continue every day to live inside a real wall.

Maria Petrides, 2007

Writer and PhD candidate

appeared in Arteri arts magazine, distributed in Cyprus and at the Serpentine Gallery, London