The Other Half Exhibition

Gülsün Karamustafa, The Apartment Building

26/01/2012 - 18/03/2012

An imposing architectural scale model, faithful representation of the multi-storey mansion of one of the wealthiest families of the Greek minority in Istanbul, that was meant to be abandoned by its owners following the dramatic, violent incidents in September of 1955 and the uprooting in Greece, dominates evocatively lit in the center of the exhibition space.

 

 

The history of the building, in which human lives and sociopolitical events meet and interweave in this multiethnic megalopolis, is outlined by the artist and new resident since 1991 of the ground floor flat of the apartment building on Cihangir Caddesi No: 28 in Beyoglu, in a laconic way.

 

Through the few documents- photographs and texts – on the wall, which constitute part of the installation, Gülsün Karamustafa with fine critical subtlety and leaving, as always in her work, space to aesthetic emotion, retrieves from oblivion painful historic memories, brings into light stories of victims, seeks human connections, new bonds and prospects...

[ source ]

 

 

Every Month: Gülsün Karamustafa, The Settler and Bosphorus 1954

 

Ιn parallel to the presentation of the new work by Gülsün Karamustafa titled The Apartment Building in the Project Room, the National Museum of Contemporary Art presents a small tribute to the work of one of the most important figures of the contemporary Turkish artistic scene, in the framework of the series Every Month. In the two spaces of the mezzanine of the Museum the double screen video installation titled The Settler, 2003 and the single channel video installation Bosphorus 1954, 2008 will be presented.

[ source ]

The Exhibition: George Hadjimichalis, The painter A.K, A novel

EMST New Commissions 2011

Project Room

09/11/2011 - 04/03/2012

was presented at the first part of the post: Half Exhibition

 

 

Nina Papaconstantinou, Ιnstead of writing

09/11/2011 - 04/03/2012

 

The highly poetic and meditative depth of Nina Papaconstantinou’s visual work, an important artist of the younger generation, aspires to present the first large scale exhibition organized by the National Museum of Contemporary Art in the framework of its policy for showcasing a contemporary, multifaceted and international, artistic potential in our country.

 

In the works on paper or directly on the wall of the last decade, most of which constitute illegible, cryptic transcriptions with an open meaning of numerous literary and philosophical texts or diary notes, the conceptual artist, with studies on philology in Athens and fine arts in London, shows the visual text at the limit of absolute whiteness, as a secret, revealing its hidden presence.

The fictions of the secret which constitute the nucleus of Nina Papaconstantinou’s drawings, are not exhausted nevertheless in the patient, persistent act of copying by the artist. They are written and rewritten each time through our endless translations and the reading hideouts which they give birth to.

 

 

Scribere necesse est, vivere non est

[Writing is a necessity, living is not]

Attributed to Heinrich the Sailor

Vilèm Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?

[ source ]

 

 

Fever / Spyros Nakas

Fever is an online multiplayer game that aims to address issues related to the management of today and to seek for the motivations, the profits and the losses that lie behind the contemporary systems of medicine and health.

[ source ]

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.

[ source ]

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. […]

[ source ]

......the other half is here