back to Athens 2013 (III)

Hotel PINDAROS

Back to Athens 2013 

CHAPTER III INVOCATION

Hotel PINDAROS 1st floor

We are currently being bombarded by news and analysis packed with obscure terms like spreads, cds, troika, which enforce new terms, question our up-to-date way of life and challenge the status quo. A group of so-called, self-proclaiemed experts surface in order to explain these newly-introduced words, giving advice as well as orders in relation to pretty much everything, ranging from the field of the economy to social life in general.

Does this subjugation of the public sphere to a such a series of terms signal a new era, which challenges the dominant western, liberal model of today’s society?

This violent invasion of terms and symbols in everyday life as well as the brutal cuts and changes in the social fabric, also have an effect in the imaginary institution of society. We can see changes in the common places of thinking and communicating are taking place as new symbols and theories are being introduced. At the same time concepts and thoughts that were once considered taboo, now resurface.

Faced with these novel circustances that are formulated by the violent changes that are taking place in everyday life the participating artists aim to give new meanings and to produce new symbols, taking into account not only the political and financial circumstances but also the personal and internal searches caused by these changes.

The artists redefine through a dialogue set up between the works, the space and the public, terms as the occult, the obvious, utopia, the reformulation of the community and individuality under today’s economical and political circumstances.

Curated by: Apostolos Zerdevas

Participating Artists: Apostolos Zerdevas, Vasilis Hlibatsos, em kei, Ian Devilde

Slipping Signs Resurfaces

Hotel PINDAROS 2nd floor

Last year’s group exhibition at Penindaplinena Gallery, titled Slipping Signs, showcased five multi-media artists working from scapes to escapes, scopes, styles and space, as the artists seized these at shifty and slippery moments. Working from seismic landscapes of burning colours from the sky, expressionistic strokes of thick oil paint enveloping the canvas, and acrylic on cardboard, to refined pencil on paper drawings, Slipping Signs’ explosive remnants of material, rephrased interruptions and formed fresh beginnings. Random and anticipated transformations transpired 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, at the time, for many of the artists’ works, took off from a given inner place, or city, where, although the intention seemed to be to move in this identifying place of ‘rest’, there was also a longing to explore disruptions that ‘promising’ sites do not anticipate. The works composing the first exhibition, Slipping Signs, evoked 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, the works exhibited a vigour, surfacing through this distinct treatment of pencil, paper, ink, acrylic, canvas and cardboard.

On a global level, we are experiencing, more than ever, a social, personal, economic, institutional, and collective volatility, during which the only way to look forward is through a critical reevaluation of a past system of secure structural powers immune to fluid forms of being human and publicly productive.

Participating artists: Anastasia Mina, Dimitra Bista, Konstantino Dregos, Clemens Behr, Socrates Fatouros, Maria Aristotelous, Kyriakos Kousoulides

Curated by: Tasos Stylianou

Pindaros / Third Floor

Hotel PINDAROS 3rd floor

The work Pindaros/Third Floor by Augustus Veinoglou and Irini Bachlitzanaki presented on the top floor of the deserted Athenian hotel is a site-specific installation, which sets as its basic premise the treatment of space as a sculptural object.Taking as their starting point the exploration of the third floor of the hotel, the artists aim to integrate the architectural built environment and other elements in the viewer’s visual and perceptual field into a single, unified experience. The chromatic interventions and sculptural additions function as tools of comprehending the space; Rather than fragmenting it they unify it and ultimately transform it.

Through the re-appropriation of the third floor the public is offered the opportunity to empirically experience the space, wandering around it and embarking upon an exploration of their own. The work aims to create an atmosphere of reflection and interiority, opening up a dialogue with its immediate city centre surroundings to which it is juxtaposed. The contemplative attitude proposed is further impelled by the employment of archetypal shapes through which the almost domestic environment is infused with elements of monumentality. 

A project by Augustus Veinoglou and Irini Bachlitzanaki

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