ART-PRESENTATION: Back To Athens 8, Part I

Back to Athens International Art Festival emerged at the beginning of the crisis in 2012, providing vital insight on the issues and concerns of the art community, while leaving conclusions to rest on interpretation. Back to Athens 2021 International Art Festival entitled “Profiles of the Future: An inquiry into the limits of the possible” manifests the ideas and proposals of the art community in response to a critical 12-month period of ambiguity and conflict, as experienced both individually and collectively. As post-pandemic societies will face the ‘new normal’, it not expected that we will recover to pre-crisis conditions. Though we stand before rapid transformations, little is certain. What will change and to what extent? Certainly, our perspectives on the future.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Back To Athens Festival Archive

Back to Athens 2021 includes 15 curators and over 100 artists and declares the artist as an “wondrous, autonomous machine”, privileged to imagine and develop through personal practice and experimentation, the most unordinary and unique artwork that may interpret the present issues and conditions, and share these findings with the public.

Themis Ragias curates [born with a ”leg up”}: The first law of artistic creation is the search for the place of the artist in the world. Like new born babies who shake one foot forward and upwards, this shaking, which is both a search and a position, is presented to us by the six young artists with their work”. In the exhibition  Kostis Fokas approaches his photographic lens closely on the human body. Sometimes he shows us details of it and other times it as a detail.  Dimitris Barouchos designs like a printing machine. With intensity, precision and perspicacity. Numerous moments compose his visual language which looks like the language of all languages.  Konstantinos Paleologos is a creator and painter. Aristophanic in style, half master and half slave, he attitudinizes, laughs and includes us all.  Charalambos Kourkoulis leaves his traces on a small scale. Semiotic, loquacious, he sets traps in the periphery of the art scene, as well as snakes and other domestic plants. Nikolas Simantirakis moves easily from the small to the very large scale. Introverted but with intense writing, he exhausts the limits of his expressive space every time.  Konstantinos Kotsis is an oligologist. He often imposes restrictions on the viewer with thin reeds and wood that the mind cannot conceive easily. He works with whatever surrounds him because he shares his ideas.

The exhibition “CC | Cinematic Cabinets” is curated by Konstantinos Argianas, the exhibition aims to address emerging issues around the intertextuality between both the history of cinema and the filmic medium itself and the contemporary artistic practice. Eight visual artists activate the mezzanines of the first floor of the Isaiah mansion, transforming them into a peculiar exhibition topology. As heterotopias inside the building, these small and claustrophobic cabinets convey memories of the former help, which interwove with the contemporary artistic interventions. In a two-way communication between new media and traditional art mediums, such as painting and sculpture, the participating artists explore personal and collective narratives, in which the past intersects with the present and the future as well: nostalgia, unfamiliarity, love, ambiguity, playfulness as well as the abnormal and the monstrous are at the epicenter of the exhibition, which ultimately raises questions about the fluidity not only of the boundaries of artistic genres, but also of human memories and emotions. Participating Artists: Alexis Fidetzis, Panagiotis Lezes, Thanos Makris, Campus Novel, Vangelis Patsialos, Maria Tsagkari, Giorgos Tserionis Vassilis Vlastaras.

The exhibition “In Slit” is curated by Hara Piperidou: Βreaths of linear, rotational, concave and asymmetric figments enter through a rift into the unforeseen. They wish to germinate locus of substantial determination, the stability of which is anchored in the temporality of the event (événement). Formative outgrowths within a slit, not confined in given considerations, release inward movements, emerging forces that on the one hand appertain to the indécidable, on the other hand expose us vulnerable to the unpredictable advent of the other as imminent. Eventual “exist – beings” are born within the im-possible, which is set as a condition of the possible. It is the moment, in which the sudden, produces this feeble power without authority (sans pouvoir). Formations of ascending directions, ejection of distillates, ingoing linear motions, cessation signals, tissue growths, consecutive espacements, strong spectral paradoxical flashes, inmost imprints, linear substandard stabilizations, irregular vortices, multiple layerings and secret transitions recommend mental and sensory trajectories of the state of the “event” (événement). Images of resistance, uncertain of their stability or static adequacy, and of sudden hiatus, appear as lightning revelations of living things; they fade, as fireflies (lucciole). They are cosmic flashes in advent, which illuminate with a dim glow our frail coexistence; It is an injonction, to which every constitution or foundation is inconsistent. This powerlessness, traceable in the field of the ruptured invention of the artwork as an “event” (événement), becomes stronger than domination; a prospective promise for the upcoming, which transcends norms, history, dominant theories. Appearing the unapproachable, the im-possible evidences the experience itself as possible. Participating Artists: Jacques Duboux, Konstantinos Kotsis, Chrysanthi Koumianaki, Anna Lascari, Andreas Lolis, Yorgos Maraziotis, Irini Miga, Fotini Palpana, Valia Papastamou, Georgia Sagri.

Photo: Lef, Center & Right: Konstantinos Palaiologos, Jungle people 33×20 cm

Info: Back to Athens 8 Curatorial team: Georg Georgakopoulos, Fotini Kapiris, Christian Rupp, Back to Athens 8 International Arts Festival 2021, Isaiah Mansion , 65 Patission & Ioulianou, Athens, Greee, Duration: 1-4/7/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri (1-2/7) 16:00-22:00, Sat-Sun (3-4/7) 12:00-22:00, www.cheapart.gr, http://apart-network.gr, http://athensintersection.blogspot.com