ART-PRESENTATION: Back To Athens 8, Part II

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.

Georg Georgakopoulos curates “Elephant in the Room”: This is definitely a very important, a very large issue or controversial matter that everyone or almost everyone is aware of, yet for obvious reasons, avoids it. No one mentions or discusses it because they find it to be uncomfortable, awkward, annoying, or even a taboo. It is that which, due to its size and our reluctance to deal with it, will not simply disappear on its own. The exhibition “Elephant in the Room” is a reminder that contemporary societies need art, yet at the same time bluntly ignoring it, chooses to focus on crafts and decorative trinkets. This pretentious behavior as one defines himself as a self-proclaimed expert, an authority on matters, whether that be a doctor, an archaeologist, a parapsychologist or coach, and at times, an artist, devalues the importance of scientific or artistic work. Art has an enormous impact in the course of shaping societies. 10 Artists attempt the impossible! They bring the elephant into the Room. Ten large-scale installations and sculptures occupy the entire space. It is difficult to ignore them, they are in front of you and around you, can you face them? Participating Artists: Spyros Aggelopoulos, Dimitris Antonitsis, Kostis Velonis, Theodoros Zafeiropoulos, Babis Karalis, Ioanna Lin, Maro Michalakakos, Kostas Bassanos, Maria Papadimitriou, Nikos Papadimitriou/ Kostas Tsolis.

Dora Vasilakou and Theodora Malamou curate the exhibition “Day Wavers”: The exhibition” attempts to detect the multiple, circular esoteric loads of ideas, sounds, references and feelings that spring under circumstances of commitment and self-restraint, as well as to envision escaping ways for the day after. The eight participant artists use different processes from a wide creative spectrum (visual arts, music and cinematography) to evaluate their private space by collecting its fragments in order to create non-linear narratives with which they calculate or challenge their strengths. Issues such as the observation of the natural world’s fluidity and rebirth, the daily repetition and the various aspects of the ephemeral, the apprehension of time and the use of language as an optical tool and shelter, constitute their research points and concerns. Constantly wavering between images, sounds and words, they focus on the transition point from one situation to the other, that decisive, intermediate moment when everything seems paused while at the same time moving in a dizzying speed: the doubt, the reluctance, the decision. A world in stillness. The silence, the whispers, the monologues that go back and forth. The last breath before the move forward. Participating Artists: Babak Ahteshamipour, Angelos kyriou, Antonis Larios, Theodora Malamou, Angelos Merges, Melina Mosland, Hannes Schumacher, Myrto Xanthopoulou

Κaktos Project present “City Dwellers” curated by Caroline May that features the work of four mid-career artists who investigate the textures and fragments, memories and potentials of the city. Dimitra Ioannou, Sotiris Panousakis, Lila Polenaki and Kostis Velonis have all found the city a source of inspiration, while it has impacted their practices in various ways. Dimitra Ioannou’s interest lies in the position of women in public space and their lack of representation. Her ongoing photographic essay “The City is Now Yours” is a kind of palimpsest: in each photo there are traces of another; the magnified surfaces of walls, pavements and slogans found in Athens are inhabited by women’s bodies and vice versa. Sotiris Panousakis views the cityscape as an ever-changing, fluid scenery of transaction, negotiation and reconciliation. He strolls around the city like a flaneur, taking pictures of what gets his attention: neon signs, shop windows, metal surfaces and light sources. Panousakis is fascinated by the spectacle the city offers but also intrigued with what lies beneath it. He has created an immense photographic archive, which he uses as the starting point for paintings made by selecting, cropping and highlighting architectural elements and neon signs, as well as elements that tend to get overlooked: plasterboard, screws and sockets, cables and beams, all of which hold together the “imaginary” and the deceiving spectacle. Lila Polenaki is best known for her large monochromatic canvases which, although abstract, include fragments from the artists’ everyday life. In one of her wanderings, the artist found herself in front of an abandoned house in the outskirts of Athens. Having entered it, she came upon a handful of love letters between a Greek man and a Swiss teacher in the 1960s. This encounter inspired Polenaki to make paintings exploring ideas of memory and loss, exchange and cross-cultural communication, as well as the life of buildings and what they stand for. Kostis Velonis typically uses found materials to create sculptures and installations that move from the personal to the political. Despair Island (2013) is a sculpture whose effects in part derive from the tension between the organic and the abstract. It is made of ceramic, plaster and wood, materials that are found in the landscape of Athens. Participating Artists: Dimitra Ioannou, Sotiris Panousakis, Lila Polenaki, Kostis Velonis

Photo: Maro Michalakakos

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