Monday 8 January 2018

The Lightbox, Show Us What You’re Made Of! The Ingram Collection

The Lightbox

Show Us What You’re Made Of! The Ingram Collection

This exhibition will juxtapose the old with the new, and show how creative and resourceful artists can be when embarking on the journey to originality. Modern British heavyweights such as Anthony Caro, Lynn Chadwick and Reg Butler will be contrasted with emerging and recently established artists, including Sophie Ryder, Sarah Tse, Olympia Polymeni and Emma Woffenden. Whether the artists are using everyday objects, new technologies or revolutionary materials, the exhibition will explore the physical qualities of the artworks, the ideas that stimulated them and the secrets behind their creation.
26 July 2016 – 2 October 2016
£5 Annual Pass | Under 18s Free

Wednesday 16 March 2016

Deep Trash: Greek Trash


Saturday 23 April 2016
DEEP TRASH: Greek Trash
at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club
£6/7 (adv.) - £8/10 (door)
19:30-02:00 (last entry midnight)

‘Sing, O muse, of the rave of Greek Trash, son of Deep Trash,
that brought countless thrills upon the Londonians…’
                                                            - Homer, The Queeriad


Get the feathers out and roll in the wax… the long-awaited Deep Trash exhibition-cum-performance club night is back in 2016 with an event entirely dedicated to Hellenic cultures, myths and contemporary politics across art, videos, performance and music for your Zorba feet!

Bring your Herculean guns, sons, and catamite funs down to the Working Men’s Club. Greek Trash demands the rejoining of other halves, the taking of Olympus, and refugee solidarity across borders. GREEK TRASH is here to destabilise your holiday plans and bring you a sizzling taste of all things Greek under London’s grey skies.

Expect: Homophilosophy, subversive bouzoukia, the bubbly birthing of Aphrodite, camp Cavafy readings, a coming out as  an octopus’, contemporary Medusas, queer & fluo post-punk Easter actions, Herculean and Androgyne bodies, a ‘Greek Crisis Cunt Cinema’, and our VERY SPECIAL guest star from Athens: ANNA GOULA!


MUSIC: A Man To Pet (Host) / Panos Z (HOMO SUPERIOR)
An eclectic mix of queer artists and icons across the decades (from Dusty Springfield and Ramones to Peaches and Grimes), with a “let’s have a tzatziki” pop & disco finale! A selection of Greek tracks will make your night even more… OPA!

LIVE PERFORMANCES: 34es / A Man To Pet / Anna Goula (feat. PanicLab) / Antonis Sideras / Catherine Elsen / Fenia Kotsopoulou (feat. Apollvon S Delios) / Queens of the Underworld / Stephen Eyre / Zoe Czavda Redo


VIDEOS: Anna Maria Pinaka / Baxx Vladimir / Danai Avgeri + Marilena Gatsiou + Maria Mitsopoulou + Laura Eftychia Papachristo / Ernesto Sarezale / Evangelos Papadakis / Georges Jacotey / HeArt Attack Films / Ian Balzan Dorizas / Kassiani Kappelos / Mary Zygouri / Olympia Polymeni / Olga Guse

ARTWORKS: Christina Koutsolioutsou / FYTA / Ilias Klis / Myrto Makridou / Studio Prokopiou / Tal Navon / Thalia Galanopoulou / THAVMA


* Image © Anna Goula, 2016 / Design: Linnea Frank

Price Information
£6 (1st wave) / £7 (2nd wave)
£8 (door, before 10pm) / £10 (after 10pm)



General Information & Press
CUNTemporary
Arts | Feminism | Queer

Deep Trash

Venue Information
Bethnal Makridou / Studio Prokopiou / Tal Navon / Thalia Galanopoulou / THAVMA


* Image © Anna Goula, 2016 / Design: Linnea Frank

Price Information
£6 (1st wave) / £7 (2nd wave)
£8 (door, before 10pm) / £10 (after 10pm)



General Information & Press
CUNTemporary
Arts | Feminism | Queer

Deep Trash

Venue Information
Bethnal Green Working Men's Club
42-44 Pollard Row, London, E2 6NB



DEEP TRASH MANIFESTO:

      Deep Trash is the only regular exhibition-cum-performance-club-night promoting queer and feminist arts from all disciplines taking place in London. 
      Deep Trash remains a fundraiser night for the activities of CUNTemporary and Archivio Queer Italia. Nevertheless, we ensure that artistic expenses are covered.
      Deep Trash launches a specific open call before each event for a fairer artistic participation and selection. The works and artists accepted will be consistent with the intersections of feminist-queer practice.
      Deep Trash adopts an inclusive political stance, with zero tolerance for discrimination of any sort.
      Deep Trash aims at showcasing the work of both emerging and established practitioners in order to create an intersectional, intergenerational and transcultural dialogue. 
      Deep Trash is especially committed to promoting performance art in order to encourage and strengthen research within current artistic discourses.
      Deep Trash provides a safe space where works of a difficult and challenging nature can be presented, documented, discussed, enjoyed and reviewed.
      Deep Trash understands sex as an inextricable part of what we do, who we are and where we come from. We support art and politics which are organized around sex. That is, the deprivatization of sex, the decriminalization of sex work, visible non-normative sexualities and non-binary gender identities, the end of sexual violence and the promotion of consensual sexual practices.
      Deep Trash insists that as artists and audiences, we need more safe and inclusive spaces where people can come together to create, share, experience, discuss, be affected, be flirted, stimulated, challenged and most importantly, EMPOWERED.



Wednesday 26 November 2014

Danae's Lovers

Danae's Lovers Trailer 

Danae's Lovers is an independent short film directed by Castro, the founder of Almita Films, starring Andreas Phylactou, Mar Del Corral, Maddi Ridley, and Ulysses Cardoso. I did the Set Design of the film and I am very happy to share the following images. 






Detail from 10 White Kilos by Olympia Polymeni, plasticine, Ort Gallery, 2012





Behind the Scenes, Southwark, London, 2014






Tuesday 1 April 2014

The Kiss



Abstract from my dissertation MA CSM, 2010, London
The Kiss

The first time I visited Tate Modern I was more than excited to see all the masterpieces in the permanent collection. When I came across Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss I spent all my time looking at it.

    The marble sculpture was mounted on a base and the real thing had nothing to do with the reproductions I was familiar with. It was like a magnet and its energy was captivating; I could not take my eyes off it and leave the room. Suddenly, it dawned on me that I could not see the girl kissing. I started walking around the sculpture trying different points of view, but I was trying in vain. I could not see her kissing unless I was permitted to climb on the sculpture or bend and spirally twist my body to peep at the couple’s kiss. But is sculpture made to be viewed in this way? The way it was presented, mounted on that base, seemed to me to justify more the title His Kiss than The Kiss. I started wondering if this was the intention of the artist or if the Tate people never thought about it.

   It is hard to answer the above question, but maybe that is not the point. Maybe it is more interesting to pose the question why we see what we see and what we understand of what we see.

    Rodin’s approach to sculpting women was a homage to them and their bodies. His intention was not to present them just submitting to men but as full partners in ardour (The Kiss, Rodin). Perhaps what my eyes reported was not true. Or perhaps my senses revealed something that my mind had not thought before.

  Reasoning, says Schopenhauer, is of feminine nature: it can give only after it has received. Without information on what is going on in time and space the brain cannot work (Arnheim, 1969, p.1).

  

    The above extract belongs to Rudolf Arnheim (Professor Emeritus of Psychology of Art at Harvard) and is the first paragraph of his book Visual Thinking (1969). Even from its title the book makes a provocative statement: that our eyes produce thought. He suggests that perception is not passive but active: it gathers types of things called concepts and uses them to produce thought; and inversely, the mind has something to think with, if the material of the senses is still present.  Arnheim’s claim is radical because in theory the mind is supposed to function in two separate ways in order to cope with the world: it must gather information and it must process it. He argues that in practice this is not the case, although  the distinction between the mind and the senses persisted through history (Arnheim, 1969).

    Greek thinkers were the first who dealt with the problem. At early stages, the human mind used to interpret psychological phenomena as physical things or events. Thus the split between the senses and the mind was first located not in the mind but in the outside world. It was the world which was divided into order and chaos, or else, into heaven and earth. Parmenides mistrusted the senses, which reported change in the world, and he called for the reason to put things in order and establish the truth. Sophists relied on the unreliability of the senses to support their skepticism: a stick dipped into the water looked broken, a distant object looked small. This was the beginning of subjectivity. A distinction between the outside world and the perception of it was established. In other words, it was the distinction between the physical and the mental. It was the beginning of psychology (Arnheim, 1969).

    Greeks were aware of the problems this distinction created but were subtle enough not to condemn the senses. The criterion for the wise use of the senses was reasoning. For Heraclitus the “barbarian souls” cannot interpret the senses and Democritus warned the mind: ‘Wretched mind, do you, who get your evidence from us, yet try to overthrow us? Our overthrow will be your downfall.’ Plato and Aristotle developed a more complex attitude. Plato distrusted direct perception and Aristotle claimed that an object was real through its true, lasting nature and not through its changeable properties. However, they never forgot that vision is the first and final source of wisdom, as it is reflected in Aristotle’s words: ‘the soul never thinks without an image’ (Arnheim, 1969).

    Arnheim continues his argument: Cognitive operations such as active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison, problem solving, combining, separating and putting in context are not privileges of the mind above and beyond perception, but essential elements of perception itself. ‘Visual perception is visual thinking’ (Arnheim, 1969, p.14).

    When I saw The Kiss I opened my eyes and I found my myself surrounded by the given world: the Gallery, the walls, the works of arts, the visitors, the sculpture and my body. All these objects were given to my eyes, they resemble the retinal projection with me having done nothing to produce them. But that given world was only the scene on which the perception took place. Through that world I directed my glance, I focused on this particular sculpture scanning details; I explored the relations of the two heads kissing each other. This active performance of the gaze is called visual perception (Arnheim, 1969).

    Therefore, vision is selective. An object may be selected for attention because it stands out of the rest of the visual world and/or because it responds to what the observer needs to see. The reason why our vision operates selectively stems from our need to survive as species (Arnheim, 1969). This fact may apply not only to the history of our evolution, but also to our everyday life. Survival explains our visual choices.

    Another example of how vision operates is its ability to complete the incomplete: a box, partly covered by a vase, is seen as a complete cube partly hidden (Arnheim, 1969). Similarly, a woman’s head overlapped by a man’s head while they are kissing is seen kissing him as well. The observer completes the fragment he sees not because of previous knowledge of the object or the action, but because this operation takes place within perception itself.

    Also, when the angle of a three-dimensional object changes this object seems to be transformed. Despite these transformations the object is perceived having a stable shape. A specific aspect of the object contains renvois, references, which suggest the subsequent ones. This is another application of our ability to complete the incomplete with our eyes. (Arnheim, 1969). Rodin’s The Kiss relies on renvois to emphasize the continuous roundness of shapes and the presentation of serpent-like figures. Our eyes actually see  what the artist does not show us directly from a particular point of view.

    Moreover, to see means to see in context. We see objects in relation to each other. These relations appear either in terms of contrast or similarity and affect strongly the way we perceive the objects. For example, under the pressure of contrast a pure red colour next to a pure yellow may turn purplish while the yellow becomes greenish. Similarly, juxtaposed shapes or objects sacrifice their identity in order to relate as a whole. Fittingness, the matching of things pointing to a whole, is an example of seeing things in terms of similarity (Arnheim, 1969):


Convexity fits concavity, the key fits the keyhole, and in the fable told by Aristophanes the male and the female yearn to restore the spherical wholeness of the original human body (Arnheim, 1969, p.65).       


Looking at a work of art is the strongest experience of active exploration of shape and visual order which goes on when we use our eyes. When the exploration is successful the work of art reveals its meaning to the viewer (Arnheim, 1969). With The Kiss the artist abstracts an action in a timeless and single representation, and by giving to the work its title he makes an absolute statement of what a kiss is. Using titles means using language and language is more open to individual interpretations. We can project our personal experience to the title. When it comes to images, though, things and ideas appear in a more specific way. The statue itself is much less adaptable to our subjectivity than the words of its title. When art is high and successful to such a degree as in Rodin’s case, we are seduced and engaged. We willingly surrender to the artist’s intentions and adjust ourselves to what we see: We see the essence of the kiss and in conjunction with the title our subjectivity fits to it as a glove: what I think a kiss is is Rodin’s The Kiss. On the contrary, when a piece is unsuccessful we deny following it. The sculpture which shares the same title as Rodin’s masterpiece, The Kiss in Kings Cross St. Pancras Station is a mere anecdote of the love story.

   The above analysis is an attempt to explain why Rodin’s The Kiss is seen “as such”. But why did I see a man kissing a woman and not the kiss? With this question we come closer to the observer’s role when we wrestle with vision.

   Maybe I was right. Maybe the sculpture had not been made to be viewed the way it was presented. An object is visually endowed with its function. For example, a bridge is perceived as something to be walked over. Works of art were made for particular purposes and places. Being demonstrated in museums and galleries the artworks are deprived from their initial function which forms their identity. They are regarded as pure shapes and this can change their appearance dramatically (Arnheim, 1969).

    A contemporary viewer sees things differently from one who admired the same piece of art in the past. Which features are grasped depends not only on the stimuli, but also on the observer. The cultural background, training, knowledge, expectations, wishes, and fears of the observer shape his vision. Memory is a crucial factor as well. Every time a perceptual act takes place, it performs a similar act which was performed in the past and survived in memory. The experiences of the present mix with the experiences of the past and precondition the future ones (Arnheim, 1969).

    Maybe I was deceived by my eyes then. The fact that I come from a cultural background that patriarchy is persistent made me see the woman submitting to the man’s kiss. Maybe I imagined Rodin as a very dominant figure because at the same time I was reading Camille Claudel’s biography; ‘Only him could this!’ was my first thought when I realised that there was no point of view from which I could see the girl kissing. Or maybe all these reasons helped me to discover something that was already there but remained unnoticed. Arnheim claims that the feat of extracting a particular element from a pattern shows that intelligence work in perception itself. In this case, visual thinking is the ability to wrest a hidden feature or disguised relation from an adverse context.

    Arnheim’s approach derives from Gestalt psychology according to which perception grasps generic structural features spontaneously. Another thinker with the same starting point is Merleau-Ponty. His philosophy questions the existence of an absolute observer. The world of perception, in other words the world that is revealed to our senses, is not the world we think we know, but a delusion. The physics of relativity confirms that an absolute and final objectivity does not exist. Modern art, philosophy and psychology point to the fact that we relate to space not as a pure disembodied subject to a distant object but rather as a being that lives in this place; we live in space not as a mind and a body, but rather as a mind with a body and we can see the truth of things because our body is embedded in those things. We have access to the external objects through our body. In this sense, it is impossible to separate things from the way they appear because the way they appear is connected with our body. In other words, it is impossible to separate things from our body because it is impossible to separate us from our body. Human beings connected with their bodies and their bodies connected with things, connected with the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1948).

    A work of art is something we perceive. Thus it is similar to the object of perception: it is in its nature to be seen and not to be analysed. The direct perceptual experience cannot be substituted by any definition and discussion of this experience, however, valuable that may be afterwards (Merleau-Ponty, 1948). The reason is obvious since we do not consist of mind plus body; it is not our body that does the perception and it is not our mind that proceeds it. We are mind with body, which means that our body not only perceives but understands as well. If we use the word senses or eyes instead of the word body we come to our starting point again: visual thinking. For Merleau-Ponty, I would paraphrase, it is body thinking.

    It was my body that responded to The Kiss and the word body embraces everything that has to do with subjectivity. My body actually responded to the view of two other bodies, a male and female kissing. To be more exact it was a representation of the two bodies kissing. But does the representation of relationships between sexes reflect any aspect of reality?

    Kate Millett offers a radical answer by starting her book Sexual Politics (1970) with an extract taken from Henry Miller’s Sexus which describes colourfully the sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. Millett puts coitus, as described in literature and history, under the microscope of her analysis showing that sexual activity does not take place in a vacuum but in a larger context of human affairs. Sex serves as a  model of sexual politics meaning that there is a great step to be made: the transition from these scenes of intimacy to a political context. She defines the term politics not as a world of meetings and political parties but as power-structured relationships by which one group of persons is controlled by another. This radical step leads to another one, even more radical: to a theory of patriarchy.   

   With her ‘notes’ (Millett, 1970, p.24), as she calls her book which became a world bestseller, she makes an attempt to prove that sex is a status category with political implications. Millett demonstrates how and why the structures of patriarchy prevailed in our civilization and how patriarchy is reflected in literature. 


One of the most unfortunate aspects of civilization is the extent to which learning and scientific interest are so deeply affected by the culture in which such study is done (Millett, 1970, p.221).

    
It could be said then that The Kiss is a sculpture which reflects the structures of patriarchy. The reason why we cannot see that is because we already see and understand our world in terms of these structures of patriarchy.
    
Seeing out of the context, or seeing what other people may not see can be misunderstood. Whether perceiving a work of art as I did is a narrow approach triggered by a hidden detail or by the general grasping of it, or whether it is a subjective reading of my body with my mind, or whether it was only a misunderstanding, it was an adventure to figure it out.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

Arty

Group Show 
Curation by Joel Chernin

Cafe Below
St. Mary Le Bow Church
Cheapside
London


Couple 3                     
Acrylic on paper  
A4
2012                                   


Installation view


Tuesday 15 January 2013

Unlimited Bodies

group exhibition

'The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.' 
Jean - Jacques Rousseau

In a world that is defined by limits, parameters and absolute order, one is bound to wonder if one should surrender oneself to such restrictions. Unlimited Bodies questions the concept of limits via the medium of art and brings together a group of artists that dare to challenge conventional barriers and have chosen to refrain from anything that might restrict their own sense of being and expression. Through the artists works, we invite you to enter a world of escapism and self-discovery and question the limitations of your day-to-day life, imagination and your body.

Born in Greece, Olympia Polymeni is an artist and sculptor. After graduating in philosophy, she studied painting at Athens School of Fine Arts and moved to London in 2009 to pursue her studies, earning an MA in Fine Art from Central St. Martins College in 2010. Olympia is interested in the female form and ANOREXINEIA is a series of sculptures where she blends the effects of anorexia on the female body and the political situation of her own home country, Greece.




Curated by: 
FAMOUSFIVE

Sarah Belanger
Thierry Forien
Jennifer Maguire
Muzna K. Al Said
Dimitrios Tsivrikos
                                                                


 


Instillation View, The Old Truman Brewery, 2013