Wax Dolls

From the publication of the group show Concrete Mirrors in Crypt Gallery

15 August-22 August 2012, London

OLYMPIA POLYMENI
ANOREXINEIA

The sculptures here exhibited are the first of the Anorexeneia series, the new project of Olympia Polymeni. Anorexia, whose Greek etymology means “without desire”, brings people to exercise control over their own body shape in the quest of an ideal beauty. However, while this is meant by the person affected by the illness as a way to sculpt his/ her own body in a perfect shape, the results are emaciated and gaunt bodies unable to sustain themselves. This shift of perception is here re-proposed by the artist, as she uses her on-going interest on the female body and its depiction to move the artistic discourse toward the political situation of her own home country, Greece. Through a sophisticate name game, not understandable by the non-natives, the waxes are linked  to the Elgin marbles, object of an international dispute between Greece and UK, and  in fact known by the Greek people as Elgineia ( “of Elgin”).

If seen as devoid of any human shape, the waxes recall the formal beauty of Hellenic classical sculptures, with clean lines and exquisite draperies. On the opposite, the warmth and smoothness of the wax and its off whitish colours hint also to the frailty of bones that doesn’t receive enough food sustainment to be as hard and strong as they are supposed to.  Preying its own flesh, in the research of its ancient beauty and strength, Greece suffers the outburst of a deadly sickness and needs stronger bones to get through this challenging period.

Text by SILVIA CASO, independent curator, London

www.silviacaso.com

                                                              

The Crypt Gallery, St. Pancras Church Installation view Photographs by Antonella Ferrari http://antonellaferrari.com/  More...

 

Ort Gallery Poster

Ort Gallery

Supporting emerging artists in Birmingham

Ort Gallery is a new gallery in Balsall Heath, an underprivileged neighbourhood in Birmingham. Ort Gallery’s aim is to showcase artwork from emerging artists, promote West-Midlands based artists and bring high quality art to the local area without the heavy price tag. Ort Gallery will sell cheap poster prints made exclusively for the gallery by the artists and allow the artists to earn an income and the buyers to invest in local talent. Furthermore the gallery will provide the local community with workshops and art related events. The entry to Ort Gallery will be free of charge and for workshops only a small fee will be charged. The workshops will allow for encounters between the local community and people attracted by the events.

This new project will bring quality art to a neighbourhood that is lacking cultural events that are questioning the local politics, the economic situation and the multiculturalism found in Birmingham. Josephine Reichert will run the gallery with the help of volunteer invigilators, made up partly of exhibiting artists.

Peripatos

Ort.

 

The Aristotelian peripatetic school linked the act of moving physically across a space with the development of a philosophical method.

Paying homage to her origins, Olympia Polymeni has actualized the concept, inviting the viewers to a walk into her artistic practice.

In the labyrinthine corridors of the “Old Print Works” building, location of the Ort Café, the visitor is immediately cast as the show's first actor, having to operate a decisive choice about movement and direction.

In the first room, red lines of color bleed through the whole length of the paper as open wounds.

The paintings were realized letting the acrylic running on a small tablet, in an apparently free process whose movement was however under the artist's control since the beginning. The rich, saturated color of the works offers a dramatic contrast with its clean lines, and hints to a royal welcoming attribute, idea that will be re-proposed in a corridor upstairs.

There, a sculpture, which was transported on the site in a small box - almost a funerary urn for fragments of imagination –, has been posed on the red pavement.

Stripped of its original hubris, this setting aims to overcome the explicit dichotomy between the red-carpet glamour and the mundane decadence of the box, and to inspire instead a breath of curiosity toward life’s possibilities.

The choice of Plasticine as the artwork’s material is not casual; Polymeni wanted to render the plasticity of classical sculptures and of anthropomorphic bones through a medium that was cheap and disposable, as human flesh seems to be considered in this contemporary society.

Plasticine was chosen also for being prone to endure, and show, the distress of travelling to Birmingham from London, where the artist’s studio is located.

Leaving a mark on the sculpture through movement was meant as a way to transform it from factual object to artwork, in the same way as in the peripatetic school thoughts were shaped into philosophy.

Walking through the building while looking for the artworks, the viewers become allies and conspirers to an almost voyeuristic act of discovery.

The flesh of these bones and blood are the viewers themselves, and pushing them out of a comfort zone, as in a transient memento mori, is a reminder that everything -art, people- has to die, but for now it is very much alive.

Curating and text by Silvia Caso 

10 white kilos, plasticine, 2012

F******* Puzzles

Feminism (“a bad word”) Puzzles is a project that follows how the idea and the depiction of the female body have been developed through time by artists or by feminist art in particular, and how the body is associated to politics.

The aim of the project is to revisit the work of key women artists juxtaposed to the work of more marginalised or even male approaches in order to challenge the perception of the viewer nowadays. Feminism Puzzles invite the viewer to find similarities or differences of meaning and visual codes between the two images.

F******* Puzzle 1

Photo 1: Vlassis Caniaris, Untitled, plaster and carnations, 1969

Photo 2: Hannah Wilke, Untitled, latex rubber, c. 1980

Break the silence: The exhibition of Vlassis Caniaris

The exhibition that signaled the exit from the artists' silence came in May of 1969 by Vlassis Caniaris (1928-2011). This historical and much - discussed exhibition took place in New Gallery, Athens and had an intense political and in a way activistic character, as it aimed not only to protest against the Regime but mainly to activate the Greek people. The works displayed included human members and objects in plaster, barbed wire, red carnations, all of them -especially plaster and carnations- with a deep symbolic meaning. The plaster, which morphologically belonged to Caniaris' work (he had already used plaster from 1963-64), was a direct reference to Papadopoulos' famous phrase "Greece is sick. We had put her in plaster. She shall remain in plaster until she recovers."

There was no exhibition catalogue as Caniaris himself had sensored the texts that were going to be published in order to avoid the exhibition from being "targeted" by the Junta. The artist says "My aim was to keep the exhibition from being targeted because then others would have lost their courage, those who were working in the context of the resistance". Instead of catalogue each visitor was offered a red carnation growing in a small plaster cube, also symbolic of the idea that the carnation is growing despite the plaster.

A few days before the exhibition Caniaris had sent abroad three packages containing the small plaster cubes with the carnation, photographs of the works and a biography so that they could be used in case of the exhibition being "targeted" by the dictatorship as he was afraid. The exhibition was a great success -Caniaris had to make another 1000 plaster cubes with carnations for the people visiting the exhibition during the 21 days that it lasted- fulfilling its aim. Even the international press published the story. After the exhibition the artist had to leave the country for Paris because he was in danger of being arrested by the Regime. Eleni Ganiti 

American Feminist Artist Hannah Wilke

Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), is considered the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery in her work. In the early 1960's she first made her signature vaginal ceramic sculptures, and in the mid 1970's she began to experiment with latex, creating individual pieces and installations of multiple "blossoms". 

"I become my art, my art becomes me... My heart is hard to handle, my art is too. Feel the folds; one fold, two fold, expressive, precise gestural symbols... latex rubber, the loose arrangements of love vulnerably exposed..." (Excerpts of Hannah Wilke Letter in Art: A Woman's Sensibility, Feminist Art Program, California Institute of the Arts, 1975.)

Visual Prejudice has caused world wars, mutilation, hostility, and alienation generated by fear of "the other."... The pride, power, and pleasure of one's own sexual being threaten cultural achievement, unless it can be made into a commodity that has economic and social utility. ... To diffuse self-prejudice, women must take control of and have pride in the sensuality of their own bodies and create a sensuality in their own terms, without referring to the concepts degenerated by culture. ... to touch, to smile, to feel, to flirt, to state, to insist on the feelings of the flesh, its inspiration, its advice, its warning, its mystery, its necessity for the survival and regeneration of the universe. (Excerpts from complete text originally published in American Women Artists, exhibition catalogue, Museo d' Arte Contemporani, Sao Paulo, 1980. Published in Hannak Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri Press, 1989.) http://www.hannahwilke.com/index.html

F******* Puzzle 2

Photo 1: Elli Souyoultzoglou-Seraidari or Nelly, Mona Palva at the Parthenon from the series Acropolis Nudes, 1927
Photo 2: Georgia Sagri, still image from Athens Polytechnic performance, 1995
 

 

The Acropolis in Female Perspective

In 1927, photos stirred up a storm of controversy on the part of historians and archaeologists in Athens. The Greek photographer Elli Souyoultzoglou-Seraidari or Nelly (1899-1998) photographed the dancer Mona Palva in the nude on the Acropolis. Although the Acropolis had been the subject of (civil) war, plunder, neglect and other blasphemy for many centuries, this was one bridge too far. The Acropolis had been a fortified site from around 1250 B.C. The dominant temple was the Parthenon, dedicated to the Goddess Athena, honoured by an enormous statue. A woman on the Acropolis was thus not unusual, but Athena as statue was well dressed.  It was the first time the Acropolis, the Greek symbol of independence and a glorious past, was shown in the company of a naked woman, even a dancer. The European Spectator, Benaki Museum

Artist in trouble over unclothed box stunt

An award-winning artist who made a splash four years ago by posing without clothes in a glass box outside the Athens Polytechnic, on the anniversary of the 1973 student revolt, will stand trial today for “scandalous behaviour.”

”Wearing a bikini outfit of white bandages, Georgia Sagri stood for over three hours in the open-roofed box among crowds taking part in the annual Polytechnic celebration, in an act she described as “performance art.”

But a prosecutor, acting on police complaints, charged the art student with “creating scandal through lewd acts.”

Sagri, 24 — who won the 1999 DESTE Prize for a video installation showing her spending five days in a Kolonaki shop window — said she had not meant to offend. “Lots of truly obscene things happen around us, with official permission,” she told yesterday’s Eleftherotypia daily. “I would call it a normal act,” her lawyer added. Ekathimerini Press

 



F******* Puzzle 3

 

Photo 1: Anna Maria Maiolino, still image from the performance Entervidas (Between Lives), 1981/2011
Photo 2: Sylvie Fleury, still image from the video Here Comes Santa, 2003

Entervidas (Between Lives) was made in 1981, as the military dictatorship in Brazil was collapsing. At a time when a return to democracy had become of glimmer of hope, Maiolino wrote: ‘I use the simplicity of the egg, the archetype par excellence of life, to talk about life. How it resists, despite everything’. This was a time of regime change when the Brazilian people were literary ‘stepping on eggshells’. Part of the performance involved placing eggs outside in the street and walking between them. There is already a precarious tension between the scattered arrangement and the vulnerability of the eggs. (Briony Fer, Precarious Fields, Camden Arts Centre)

Here Comes Santa (2003) is a video. The camera focuses on a pair of lean, female legs in delicate high heels walking across a red carpet covered with silver glitter balls. The balls shatter loudly under the stiletto heels. Gracefully but decisively the destruction continues with each step: the fragile, red-and-silver Christmas idyll is broken into a hundred thousand pieces. (Cooling Out-On the Paradox of Feminism, jrp ringier)