Half Exhibition

Carlos Garaicoa, Photo-topographies

EMST Commissions 2011 - Project Room

The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens presented from November 9th 2011 until January 8th 2012 the new work by internationally acclaimed Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa titled Photo-topography.

The installation consists of nine three dimensional photographs made of polyspan material and equal black and white photographs taken by the artist in Havana and Caracas, which were used as basis for their creation. Describing in his artistic proposal the process of transferring the photographic document to a new material, like polyspan, the artist mentions:

My new project for the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens consists of photographs printed with a new technique. The photographs are plotted in a 3D machine that converts the actual picture in a 3D polyspan object. The result, extremely fragile but beautiful, is a sort of topography of urban landscapes, with indents and blasts of polyspan that grow according to a scale of gradations of gray, black and white within the negatives, which we predetermine with the plotting machine. For me this project consists in a research on forcing the limits of photography.

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George Hadjimichalis, The painter A.K, A novel

EMST Commissions 2011 - Project Room - Until 05/02/2012

An Encounter with the Other

[…] The starting point of George Hadjimichalis. The painter A.K.. A novel is the construction of an Other person, and its objective is to tell the story of that person’s life. By constructing a new person, Hadjimichalis is charged with imagining the details of his identity, namely his gender, his ethnicity, his age, the time in which he lived, his occupation, state of mind, etc.

Therefore, Hadjimichalis puts together a character that is, primarily, of interest to him, for his own personal reasons and artistic preoccupations.

So we have a male artist, a painter in particular, who, were he alive today, would be 87 years old, though he died at the age of 60.

We could argue that these biographical details of the fictional hero are not accidental. Hadjimichalis makes his hero exactly 30 years his senior – so he could be his father’s age – and has him live to around the same age that Hadjimichalis is now.

It is obvious that the name A.K., in the case of this particular piece, is not merely a pseudonym, as in A Moment in the Mind of Mr. A.K., but a heteronym, to use Fernando Pessoa’s literary sense of the word. Just as Pessoa attributed his works to literary alter egos, so Hadjimichalis, in a similar way, doesn’t just choose a pseudonym for this piece, but creates a character with a complete identity, an alleged biography, a particular physique, and a personal painting style. He creates, in other words, an artistic alter ego, which he then confronts.

The difference is, of course, that Hadjimichalis makes us aware of this practice, highlights it, in fact, in contrast to the Portuguese author, who kept it quiet. […]

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......the other half is here