Rescaping
Group exhibition.
Apothikes Papadaki - Limassol Municipal Arts Centre.
May-July 2022.
Rescaping was a group exhibition in Limassol, Cyprus where I exhibited three new pieces. It was a sort of continuation of the exhibition ‘Scaping’ which took place in Leipzig the previous fall.
Viewers.
Hundreds–actually millions–of eyes gazing; grazing almost. They feed on an endless stream of visual data. All these dissonant (disvisant?) images form an ocean of noise, engulfing us, trapping us, soothing us. The eye motif is based on a painting by my late aunt Gía, an artist suffering from schizophrenia. It’s easy to see the eyes as a metaphor for paranoia, but by now we’ve all joined the silent chorus of those watching others – and being watched.
Contested Territories.
High-resolution, nearly microscopic images of aquarelle on glass reveal alien landscapes of mountains, rivers and sandbanks – all created in our head as our mind tries to make sense of the abstract image. Here, these artificial landscapes are flown as flags of contested territories. The contention of mental landscapes, interpretations and ideas is an affliction of our polarised era. In ideological warfare our mind is the frontline.
Playing in the museum during the exhibition was my sound-collage Alien Communication where the unintelligible languages (to us!) of birds, humans and machines reverberated through a strange space.
Exhibition notes:
“Rolling hills, forests and ocean views form the landscape pictures of classical art, but every day we encounter soundscapes, cityscapes, mental landscapes, mediascapes and ideologies structured by careful (and often forceful) historical scaping. The list goes on. In the widest sense, interpreting sensory stimuli is automatically creating recognisable scapes from abstract ones.
Artists are always shaping the environment, making new scapes, new vistas and ideas. Scape is related to the Old Norse ‘skapa,’ which means to create, and it has survived in that form in the modern Nordic languages. In ‘Rescaping,’ artists from all over Europe–Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Cyprus–recreate their surroundings in various ways and examine the multitude of scapes that make up our world.
‘Rescaping’ is in part a continuation of ‘Scaping,’ an exhibition that took place in Leipzig last autumn. Every act of scaping requires chipping away, reorganising or adding material to create something new. But what does it mean to re-scape, then? Does one strive for improvement, difference for difference’s sake, or rather philosophic repetition in the Kierkegaardian sense, staying on the path so as not to stray?”
Also exhibiting work in Rescaping were:
Alexia Achilleos
Caroline Thon
Christina Papakyriakou
Dio Dio
Nicolò Brezza
Opsis