ART CITIES: Athens-Ada Anastasea
Where you hail from and where you now reside are two of the most significant facts about anyone. Place can be a central facet of someone’s identity. The place or places where one has lived, with their attendant physical, historical, and cultural attributes, condition what one knows and how one sees. Certainly an artist’s geographic history affects the appearance and meaning of his or her art.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gallery 7 Archive
In her solo exhibition “Our Old House Withstands”, Ada Anastasea presents a new series of works that deals with the meaning of house and home, memory and mnemonics, abandonment and time, with the gaze of a traveler through space and time. The stepping stone from her new series was one Good Friday, that after many years she visited again her paternal home, in which she lived her first childhood years and discovers that although it is abandoned, it still stands, with the garden in its place and the foliage extended inside. Through the new relationship that is created between space and nature, concrete and light, a sequence of emotions unfolds, which pushes the artist to unravel the thread of her personal narrative, in a path that extends from the interior to the exterior and the foliage that penetrates from the garden inside, with different means of expression. Her new series reflects upon tensions between private worlds and the wider socioeconomic realm, and how local iterations of a culture might act as a site for the hopes and fears of those living in a (faltering) globalised world. Different means of expression (Painting, Photography, Embroidery, Engraving) help the artist in a process of deconstruction and reassembly of an old world that leaves behind, which contains dreams and nightmares. The variety of means of expression do justice to the expanse of ideas and themes in the works. The biggest challenge for her is to find the material to do what she needs to do.
Photo: Ada Anastasea, Children’s bedroom, 2021, color digital photo on Dibond, 30 x 40 cm, © Ada Anastasea, Courtesy the artist and Gallery 7
Info: Curator: Efi Michalarou, Gallery 7, 20 Solonos & Voukourestiou str., Athens, Greece, Duration: 8-31/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fri 11:00-14:00 & 18:00-21:00, Wed & Sat 11:00-15:00, www.gallery7.gr
