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

Sowieso at Kreuzberg Pavillon

Athina Antoniadou, Klass Hübner, Astrid Menze, Demetris Neokleous, Maria Petrides, Panikos Tembriotis, Witte Wartena

Bang! Pow! Pff!
Simon says, 'let...'
Simon says, 'let us...'
Simon says, 'let us explode...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for half...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for half an...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for half an hour...'
Simon says, 'let us explode for half an hour today.'
Syria - shuffling with spades to dig out our positions to empathise. Where can we empathise from? We're spraying connections to stay connected with the other side of things. Half an hour of activity diffuses aggression. Sounds soiled from de-lighted daily found events and objects, people and places, subjects and sirens, re-imagine another space in the other side of things.

Please turn your head to the left.

We're in a life of documentary-ing.
Carrying events from far away into present forms.
Norms shift and slip once we capture them on screen and in ink.
We do think.
But we look anew at terms of reconsideration.
Exhilaration builds bonds for crossing those difficult differences. Interferences rehearsing themselves; improving relations and forming new interactions. Scratching surfaces. Counting curves. Fiddling falsehoods.
Unimportant men making decisions, very important ones, about our lives, our documentary-ing.
Repeating wrecking rituals.
And we, dance, deliriously, in another documentary-ing, of our claimed, desires.
Barack says, 'we...'
Barack says, 'we believe...'
Barack says, 'we believe in...'
Barack says, 'we believe in change...'
Barack says, 'we believe in change and...'
Barack says, 'we believe in change and freedom...'
Barack says, 'we believe in change and freedom and...'
My ink ran out on the last two words.
Barack says, 'we believe in change and freedom' (and revolution).

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.

(Relax and let the right one in)

Sirens of distressed ambulances warned the walking busybodies of the city that they must get somewhere immediately. Heads turned swiftly as gravel hurled to their feet from the speed of the ambulance. Murmuring sounds of people anxiously trying to get to their 9-hour shifts on time could be heard like a fading beat, as they rushed into the underground wondering whether there were to be a delay on the trains. The outbursts of youth on the unswept streets of Athens had left their traits of deep disaffection behind. Smashed windows of stores in Kolonaki, the city’s only remaining clean and, until then, untouched area, awakened these citizens to new wonders. The month of April 2009 was happening for the first time. This marked the event as singular. Were all events exclusive, wondered Myrna as she walked away from the arresting scene of police crime at Constitution square and towards the lovers’ scene.

Outside a run-of-the-mill Costa Café, just at the beginning of darkness, Clement and I froze in a lock of gaze, the kind that holds you in a time where memory never seems to have existed. The arms of Clement wide open, the shape of desire and need (Barthes) unfolded as my longing eyes captured that zestful moment in a warm embrace. Two bodies met; their soft mouths lured each other’s breath. The heat between us lovers intensified as did the rage of the disaffected. And just as I was suspended in what seemed like a timeless moment, only several kilometres away the city of Athens was turning red in flames and fury, the fierce police fumbling for opposing inhabitants to drag to their dungeon. Trouble usually starts from authorities, overregulated and under, barring dissenting voices, and ignoring the injustices they help generate and keep in tact. Echoing and embryonic voices waiting at the line. One minute people are ready to slip off the slithering edge, and the next, they are just pending… without witnesses, an unimagined tomorrow and an unimaginable moment of the present.

And as the rioting environment came to a break and I released myself from the curved clasp of Clement, it occurred to me for the first time that I wasn’t the only one disconnected from the political passion surrounding us. The next day would swallow up the remaining tear gas and smoky air from the blasting molotovs; the enraged would still feel enraged, perhaps with a real sense of the city now vacuumed of several functioning shops; the government officials would turn their attention to new 'criminal' records; and it would seem like the purpose of these outbursts was to destroy a few small shops.




Published in The Moment at SMITH magazine

http://www.smithmag.net/moment/story.php?did=310210

Slipping Signs

Opening: 13 January 2012, 20:00
Duration: 14 January– 8 February 2012


Penindaplinena Gallery is pleased to  present the group show entitled, Slipping Signs.

Dimitra Bista | Socrates Fatouros | Anastasia Mina | Maria Aristotelous | Konstantinos Dregos

Landscapes seem seismic when burning colours from the sky and expressionistic strokes of thick paint envelop the canvas. In this group show at Penindaplinena Gallery, explosive remnants of material rephrase interruptions and form fresh beginnings. The exhibition Slipping Signs showcases five multi-media artists working from scapes to escapes, scopes, styles and space, as they seize them at shifty and slippery moments. In these works, random and anticipated transformations transpire from dark to light, from reflection to position, from networks of lines to swelling surfaces, addressing matters of identity and continuation, repetition and inscription, site and interiority, frame and de-centralization.   

A starting point for many of these artists’ works takes off from a given inner place, or  city, where, although the intention seems to be to move in this identifying place of ‘rest’, there is a longing to explore disruptions that ‘promising’ sites do not anticipate. The works composing the exhibition Slipping Signs evoke a new habitat to revive vision, to dream another dream, to embark on re-constructing intimate possibilities where the impulse of identifying insists on slithering. Comfortable in zones of indefinite and infinite connections, these artists’ works vigorously surface through a distinct treatment of pencil, paper, ink, acrylic, canvas and cardboard.               

Maria Aristotelous’ thick coats of paint in long strokes splattered in apparently unintended smears are pencil lined, like fluid feathers of interaction and interruption in these painting’s reflections. Dimitra Bista’s refined pencil on paper drawings subtly move in a net of lines and scratches which seem to meet somewhere between a deliberate de-centralization of ‘beginning’, and, a lack of colour and neat symmetry. Although working with seemingly inflexible materials, such as leather and porcelain, glass plaster and tar, Konstantinos Dregos’ sculptures, like flesh, flow organically through space without ever trapping these forms in a solid surface. Paint drips on canvas like water seething before the bubbles morph into flowers, half blooming, half fleeing. In a leveling and surging force, the drawings of Anastasia Mina work like pencil and writing; smooth surface and compulsive depth; an urging and urgent process of impulsive intensity which, while engrossed in a swirling repetition, also dissolves the raw residues of lead to reach a liberating coexistence of black on white. In City End, Socrates Fatouros handles the textures of oil and acrylic on cardboard through a fragile vigor of colour, which erupts, in a volcanic temper, from the centre out. The city doesn’t end somewhere; it unfolds. No longer a heart, the edges of this city extend beyond an ‘identifiable’ city, or as in the sculpture, City 1, the sign and the city stand tall yet dizzy, suspended from a precarious pole.

Maria Petrides, Independent writer




Επικοινωνία:
PENINDAPLINENA Gallery
Τάσος Στυλιανού
Ε: tassos@50-1gallery.com, m: +357 99 522977, t: +357 25 340727

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

'New News is Old News' - Wonder Women Residency

Stories Told Now, 2011

Ink on Paper


Working with words and language and seeing how these fit into a discourse particular to Cyprus set off this piece of work. In a kind of web language, not activated between communities - like the regional language of Cyprus - Maria Petrides explores how, if initiated, this language could spark new stories and/or revisit a past when language was set in motion. This piece looks at what new ‘function’ or impact a text, developing from oral stories, can have when moved into a gallery space where stories ‘speak’ to others. They are temporarily residing in a space, meters away from an erasing line, which keeps these stories apart. Unfettered and unfiltered, she forms free-for-all questions, which bring these stories together, and also join with many collected from viewers wishing to scrawl their own, short or long, on the paper sliding along the wall. Additionally, a pile of Post-its and a box are set aside for viewers to drop in their contact details, intended for a meeting with the artist.

ReSpass

IT

I want to play with you, dear stranger. I wish to give to you what is “mine”, and not.

Through my rucksack (inside my spine until it exits) I tag your head, T., with my knuckles.

My unrecognizable desires, my interrupting fears, my long cheers, and my dreams of planets where humanity trades in words, are IT.

T. strokes the left cheek of W. She passes on her ripe agitation, her freedom of uncertainty, her unruly mischievousness, and the map of her mind, which leads to random places yet to be found? She tickles her face as she makes W. IT. And W. smiles at the other gratefully, as she races after P. with a suitcase of my and T.’s touch. P. might have a transparent straw, two round black stones, a slender orange rope, and a red fountain pen in his container. As W. prods him, he freezes-he tags her. He ties her feet loosely with the orange rope, rests each stone in her open palms, unbuttons her shirt, and with his fountain pen writes on her bare stomach, ‘let’s play again’. At the caress of his fuzzy index finger against her skin, he forces her jaw open, pops in the straw and breathes into it with his salivating mouth. His oxygen-her oxygen-T.’s oxygen, my oxygen, whose oxygen?

You are now IT.

The exhibition ReSpass deals with notions of the “artist” and the “curator” in a linking game of role-playing, reminding us intensively of Tag, the children’s game.
The role of artist and curator is fused here. Ideas are fluidly exchanged between role-subvertors. In an open networking, each touches on the personal stories, emotions, conversions of objects, fears, mobile spaces, visions, con-fusions, memories, art collection, and is called to handle these under their own “curatorial” experimentations. A string of curating is unleashed in this show. “Professional” curating is approached humourously here. What makes a “curator” a curator and how do artists then become “curators”? The show invites the playful viewer to follow the tag, which connects the roles of “artists” with “curators”.
The basic rules of Tag are quite simple. All you need is a group of kids and a decent size backyard. One person is “designated” as “it” and that person runs around and tries to touch someone else. If they succeed, the person they touch is now “it” and tries to chase everyone else. The game continues until everyone is exhausted…

The exhibition ReSpass is taking place within the broader framework of the exhibition ReMap 2, which is running parallel to the 2nd Athens Biennale.
Opening parties start at 20.30 on June 16th and 17th. On these nights an interactive musical installation will take place.
Location: Millerou 27, Metaxourgeio
Duration: 
June 16th - July 31st

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.

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’?