Central Exhibition title, Everywhere but Now
Chief Curator: Adelina von Fürstenberg
Venue: GENI TZAMI
HARIS EPAMINONDA (Cyprus) / video-photos
Born in 1980 inNicosia, Cyprus. Lives in Berlin.
In the last few years, the artist has produced a series of radiant, emotional, audio--‐visual works, whichare long enough to soak into the viewer’s consciousness yet short enough to assume the qualities of avision. Reality is kept at arm’s length, its absence not particularly noticed, while the present is lost in afictionalized past. Most of Epaminonda’s recent video works are based on re--‐shot excerpts of film andtelevision footage which she then subtly reworks.
For her latter photographic series (all Untitled, 2008--‐ongoing), Epaminonda shot hundreds of Polaroidimages of printed matter. In her sequenced display, these re--‐imaged images smack of an Everymantraveller. The time frame of these images is hesitant to divulge itself, while the contemporary style ofeach image’s cropping seems anachronistic to the thing it depicts; frame and photograph are alwaysat odds. Yet despite this formal discord, there is an undeniable seductiveness to Epaminonda’s series.The viewer encounters camels, peacocks, and zebras; oddly cropped palms, and impossibly steepravines; painterly landscapes and cinematic vistas.
The grain of the photograph – sometimes a burnished aubern glow and other times a classic
monochrome – renders each image into a wistful and painterly abstraction of the concrete. Theromanticism of such images mimics the register of fin--‐de--‐siecle expedition journals and the utopianexoticism of twentieth--‐century travel writing. Shown in their hundreds, Epaminonda’s Polaroidsbecome a hallucinatory image of travel’s own desire. […]
‘With the Polaroids, I am revisiting and recapturing a world that seems to be full of fragmentedmoments and instances,’ says Epaminonda. ‘But I am doing so from a future perspective.’ Thus, for theartist, time folds in on itself. ‘What is in the image is the past caught in the present, which is thefuture,’ she adds.
If shared memory of civilization is not only represented by the memorials it chooses to erect, but alsoby those it chooses to photograph, then Epaminonda’s work interrogates this mobile memorialisationto her own ends. It prises open the static immobility of photographed objects to reveal the plausibilityof other worlds. ‘Images have no bones or flesh,’ says the artist. ‘They are more like air, having thecapacity to “ressurect”.’
HÜSEYIN KARABEY (Turkey) / Video
Born in 1970 inIstanbul, where he lives and works
Director, writer, and producer Huseyin Karabey was born in 1970 to a Kurdish family and studiedat UludağUniversity and MarmaraUniversity. After making over a half dozen documentary filmsfrom the 1990s through the 2000s, he made his first feature, MY MARLON AND BRANDO (2008).
The film premiered at Rotterdam, won the prize for Best New Narrative Filmmaker at Tribeca,
and earned him praise as a director to watch.
No darkness will make us forget by Hόseyin Karabey is a well choreographed animation aboutHrant Dink, the Istanbul--‐based Armenian journalist killed by 17--‐year old Turkish nationalist in2007. This short film highlights his wife Raquel Dink's speech at his funeral --‐ attended by hundredsof thousands of Armenians and Turks alike --‐ an intense and strong message which becomes amanifesto of peace and tolerance.
ROSANA PALAZYAN(Brazil) / video installation
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1963. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Rosana Palazyan makes works of art that are subtle, brutal, and sublime. Her content reveals the realityof the everyday experience of the people with whom she talks and works; it brings forth the innerthoughts of adolescents in detention and people. They are the untouchables, tabooed. The opportunityshe offers to the people she engages are, more often than not, silenced as well as unseen. The wordsher invitation elicits are often surprising and even shocking, not only for the violence and abuse theyexpress but for the tenderness and hope. Her presentation is so delicate that it could be overlooked ordismissed were it not so alluring that one cannot but inspect it closely to encounter its message — andoften shrink back in alarm. While she has made powerful installations, the work is often small in scale,drawing you close to inspect detail, into an intimate relationship with the objects.
A room with a circular video projection on the wall with images of my embroideries mixing other images-a kind of poetical video. The video projector needs to be a one that is a high definition without need tobe done in a dark room. I don’t like dark room for this kind of work. I did an exhibition last year here withthis kind of projector, with a not dark room, and it was so beautiful. Please, see the drawings, the otherelements on the room: Threads on the floor--‐ with different kind of blue and green. I will need to knowabout the Mediterranean colour. Using a big quantity of threads I will draw on the floor (as you can see inthe drawing). A wood deck--‐ an old wood, from demolition places: The public will be in this deck to see
the work. I don’t know yet if the people could walk at the lateral of the room. As it is an installation,many things will be decided only when I will be there to install the work. I would like to show at theexhibition, the handkerchief that my grandmother did in Greece (at the Red Cross, when she was waitingto go to Brazil). This piece is with me now. I think that everything will start in this object. It is a smallpiece, and I need to think a way to show this piece in this room.
(Rosana Palazyan)
JAFAR PANAHI (Iran) / video
Born in Mianeh (Iran) in 1960. Lives and works in Teheran.
Jafar Panahi trained as a director with Iranian television, for whom he subsequently made severalshorts and documentaries. Afterwards he worked as Abbas Kiarostami’s assistant director. Panahi's firstfeature film came in 1995, entitled The White Balloon. This film won a Camera d'Or at the Cannes FilmFestival. His second feature film, The Mirror, received the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno FilmFestival. He received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2000 for The Circle. Panahi alsodirected Crimson Gold in 2003, which brought him the Un Certain Regard Jury Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Panahi also won the Berlin Silver Bear in 2006 for Offside. This is not a film was premieredat the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 and his last feature Closed Curtain won the Silver Bear for BestScript at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013.
The Accordion is focused on two youngstreet musicians playing the accordion andthe tablas to earn their living. One day,while they are playing in front of a mosque, their accordion is taken awayfrom them by a man. They begin to look for him and suddenly, in the maze of thebazaar, they recognize the sound of theiraccordion and discover the same mansitting on the floor and begging whileplaying their instrument.
ZINEB SEDIRA (Algeria) / installation
Born in Algeria. she lives and work in London.
Zineb Sedira’s work is focused on language and storytelling. Dealing with mobility and coloniallegacies, as well as intergenerational transmission, her videos and photographs have always apersonal point of view, in order to underline the importance of the oral memory and to analyse alarger discussion on collective memories and stories.
GAL WEINSTEIN (Israel) / painting /sculpture
Born in 1970 inRamat Gan (Israel). Lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Gal Weinstein is one of the leading artists of the younger Israelian generation. His works are
characterized by sensitivity to material and space, preoccupation with surface via inferior syntheticmaterials, camouflage and substitutes, and a fundamental ambivalence regarding the potentialpolitical content implied by the work.
Fire Tires, high sculptures made of wax,wool, polyester, styrofoam and graphite,is based on images published in thepress. The work may be considered as apolitical image evoking notions of 'withor against', 'order or disorder' or'involvement or protest'. Notions that are related to the image rather than itsspecific object for it is not the object thatis put up 'against something' or 'withsomething' but rather the political imageas a brand – the difference betweenexpression and opinion. This work alsoeasily translates as a universal symbolthat reflects rubber production, cheapfuel, social--‐political implications as wellas environmental devastation.
Venue: ALATZA IMARET
BEFORELIGHT (Greece/Thessaloniki) / light installation
BEFORELIGHT is a Greek--‐based creative group that carries out artistic experiments with the use of light.
Members: Eliza Alexandropoulou, Dimitra Aloutzanidou, Cristina Ampatzidou, Konstantina Evangelou,Kelly Efraimidou, Dimitris Theocharoudis, Maria Lazaridou, Vasilis Ntovros and Eirini Steirou.
BEFORELIGHT conceptualizes designs and applies light art and design, in an effort to encourage publiccollective experience with natural or artificial light. They follow a process which takes site specificity intoaccount, along with the innovative use of old and new lighting devices. The team members use expertisefrom architectural and stage lighting design, while BEFORELIGHT group creates light installations andlight art happenings in order to present the dynamic nature of light.
Beginning with our need to collaborate with the local community, we're thinking of making a researchon the neighbourhood around Alatza and get to know the residents, the shop-owners, the studentswho live there and collect some information (personal stories, photos, objects etc) through filming,photo shooting and texting. We are very interested on the way this monument is placed on the urbantissue with all the houses surrounding it. For locals, Alatza Imaret is their neighbourhood, the firstimage that see when they open the windows in the morning, the place where they hang around in ahot summer day. In a way, the historic aspect of this monument has been transformed into thepersonal stories of the neighbourhood.The main part of the installation will be developed under the canopy of the building. There could beplaced a number of surfaces designed with the form of QR codes so as to create different arabesquemotives. Our goal is that these QR codes can be read by a mobile camera and present the collectedinformation, as described above The surfaces could be made either form glass (as a reference to theart of vitraux) or plexiglass and the point is to be perforated in some parts and enhanced with somecolorful parts so as to interact with the physical light during daytime as well as with light sources at
night. We are really fond of this idea because the qr code, in context, is a modern source of
information and historiography and as a form it bears great ressemblance with the arabesque motivesof the islamic word. Furthermore, the vitraux tecnique has a great interaction with light and is a traceof the colorful lost minaret of Alatza Imaret --‐ distinguishable for its colours.
(Beforelight)
GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA (Turkey) / video installation
Born in Ankara in 1946. Lives and works in Istanbul.
Gόlsόn Karamustafa reflects on the sociopolitical and economic shifts of the past ten years and theaccompanying move toward a global economy. As an artist she addresses cultural displacement andeconomic nomadism in a universal aesthetic language that allows for a multivalent reading of herwork. Over time Karamustafa's works have addressed and questioned various tropes of the so--‐calledOrient. By appropriating the work of Eugθne Delacroix, Jean--‐Auguste--‐Dominique Ingres, and othernineteenth--‐century orientalists, Karamustafa allows for a complex reading of the expressions of male desire, whether that of the French maestro or the Turkish Sultan.Among other interesting issues that I came across during my visit to Thessaloniki, the images of the‘Jewish Porters’ that I saw at the Museum of Photography highly impressed me. The ghosts of thosephotos followed me through my surveys in the city at other exhibitions as well as in our visit to theWhiteTower, always reminding me the images of other porters from many Mediterranean ports. I live in
Istanbul and I have experienced the representational language of photography introducing my city withporter photographs to the world scene to emphasize the poverty of the country until the end of 80s andI know the hidden language of such images well. This interest gave way to search for the porterphotographs from the Mediterranean ports and what I have witnessed was more than I could expect.Also many of them, being in the form of postcards raised new questions for me.
(Gόlsόn Karamustafa)
ANGE LECCIA (France) / video projection
Born in 1952 in Minerbio (Corsica). Lives and works in Paris.
Major figure on the French contemporary art scene, Ange Leccia produces films, installations anddeploys video projections in architectural interventions and arrangements, to relay stories of personaland public dramas. He is professor at the Ιcole nationale supιrieure d'arts de Cergy-Pontoise (ENSAPC)and directs research for young artists at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
The image flows slowly. It shows the face of a young woman under the water. Thanks to the tight framingand the white background, the context disappears. The viewer does not know anything of this femalefigure whose dress in tulle is a too feeble clue to allow an identification. The story became an abstraction.And time goes in a loop, without direction. This work is about breathing: considering the visual saturationin our contemporary world, Nymphea chooses to disappear. The work itself is hollowed out in order topreserve energy in a paradoxical way. Ange Leccia chooses the water as a screen that waits for the mentalprojections of the viewer. The fluidity on the screen is then a way of emphasizing the transformation thatwill take place in the exchange. The young woman is an allegory, a perception, a process that is constantly
changing.
MARK MANGION (Malta) / video projection
Born in Malta in 1976. Lives and works in Paris and Valletta.
Mark Mangion studied Painting (Parsons School of Design ‘01) and Sculpture (Royal College of Art ’05). Hisresearch merges curating practices and art production repositioning them as site-specific ventures,generating diverse structures, filtered through visual culture resulting in multimedia processes with acentral focus on public systems and cross--‐field collaboration. In 2008 he founded Malta ContemporaryArt, an ongoing project, which has to date involved over 100 different collaborators. In 2012, he launchedParallel Borders, a long--‐term project established as a roving platform focusing on a multidisciplinary
collective operating in significant theoretical fields and territories of political relevance around the world.
Border Stories (WT) is a filmpresenting a collection of compellingsituations documenting a journey ofisolated moments in the lives ofindividuals living between two seasalong the bordering stretch of landbetween the Dead Sea in the WestBank and Mediterranean Sea in Israel.Reflecting on a diversity of realities ofthe Palestinian and Israeli people,often hijacked by political stalemateand territorial and religious conflict,this film seeks to reveal a web ofpoignant, poetic and mundane storiesof ordinary people and communitiesand their everyday lives, positioningitself as an objective observation ofplace, time, culture and landscape.Scanning both sides of the border, acomplex non-linear and non-confrontational narrative unfoldsengaging with a series ofenvironments in a visually stunningmeditation of this land.
PETER WÜTHRICH (Switzerland) / photos
Born in 1962 inBern, where he lives and works.
Peter Wüthrich juxtaposes the primary function of books as carriers and transmitters of knowledge andmeaning with highly poetic images based on a humanistic view of the world. […]By transforming accidental passersby --‐ordinary people the artist happens to meet on the streets of therespective city --‐ into angels with the help of books as wings, the artist takes on the role of God and alsoanswers some fundamental questions about the essence of angels: Are angels of this world? And if so,can they be cosmopolitan? Can angels be considered French or American or German or Asian, or aren't nall angels “Angels of the World“?
“Salut au monde!”
“I see the cities of the earth and make myself at random apart of them, I am a real Parisian, I am a habitan of Vienna,St. Petersburg, Berlin, Constantinople, I am of Adelaide,Sydney, Melbourne, I am of London, Manchester, Bristol,Edinburgh, Limerick, I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Bercelona,Oporto, Lyons, Brussels, Bern, Frankfort, Stuttgart, Turin, Florence; I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw, ornorthward in Christiania or Stockholm, or in Siberian Irkutsk, or in some street in Iceland, I descend upon allthose cities, and rise from them again.I see African and Asiatic towns, I see Algiers, Tripoli, Derne,Mogadore, Timbuctoo, Monrovia, I see the swarms of Pekin,Canton, Benares, Delhi, Calcutta, Tokio, I see Teheran, I seeMuscat and Medina and the interventing sands; I see Egyptand the Egyptians, I see the pyramids and obelisks, I seeranks, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, I go among them, Imix indiscriminately, and I salut all the inhabitants of theearth. Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth, each ofus here as divinely as any is here.”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Venue: STATEMUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
(MONI LAZARISTON)
BILL BALASKAS (Greece/Thessaloniki) / installation
Born in Thessaloniki. Lives and works in London.
Bill’s videos and installations have participated in more than 50 exhibitions and festivals around the world.Venues where his work has been exhibited include Musιe des Abattoirs, Toulouse; Macedonian Museumof Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki; British Film Institute, London; BolteLang Gallery, Zurich; A Foundation(Liverpool, UK). Furthermore, he is an awarded writer (British Council of Greece, 2005) and screenwriter(Worldfest Houston International Film Festival, 2006).The arts have not remained unaffected by the unprecedented economic crisis that still lingers: partsof the art market have shrunken, severe budget cuts are implemented by art institutions and artists face increasing difficulty in their effort to produce new work and support themselves. In many cases, mit is evident that culture is not a priority for policymakers, as well as for many people around theworld who struggle to satisfy some of their most basic needs. The neon sculpture Culture reflects onthis situation, by not being able to perform its major function: lighting up. The source of its power(the socket) appears too far to be reached. Inevitably, then, in order for Culture to shine, either thework should be moved closer to the source of power, or some extra element has to be addedbetween the neon’s cable and the socket, in order to establish a connection. At the same time, bybeing written with antique lettering, the work also alludes to otheraspects of the crisis. Thus, Culturecould be perceived as a reference to the Greek crisis and the way it has redefined Greece’s image as aglobal symbol of socioeconomic failure. Or, perhaps, one could associate the work with Latin and thecase of Italy, which has played its own role in the European crisis. Notably, the blue colour of the neonis used as both countries’ national colour in various occasions, like, for example, in sports (nationalteams). Finally, one could add another level of interpretation associated with the evidently “kitsch”aesthetic of the work, which imitates an ancient visual style through a banal contemporary material.In this context, the work may constitute an invitation to rethink the (visual) culture of the pre-crisis era and reexamine its true value. At a time when the extravagant, consumerist lifestyle of the recentpast seems largely out of place, art should make a stance by calling for simplicity, directness,“honesty” and, in the end, elemental beauty.