Παρασκευή 31 Αυγούστου 2007

CROSSROADS


CROSSROADS

In the frame of Biennale1


The Photography Centre of Thessaloniki participates in the concurrent programme of the 1st Biennale of the State Museum of Contemporary Art with the group photography exhibition "Crossroads".

The opening of the exhibition will take place on
Monday, September 10th 2007 at the TETTIX gallery (Tsimiski Rd. & Dialetti 3) at 20:30 and will last through October 5th.

As cities collect distinct groups of people with varying social or national backgrounds and religious traditions as a rule, they favor "meetings" between disparate people and elements. These kinds of crossings -predictable, coincidental or unanticipated- where the subject of the
camera lenses of the
Thessaloniki Photography Center’s artists Thanasis Raptis, Efthimis Mouratidis, Avgerinos Zaharias, Ismene Goula, Vasilis Karkatselis, Yorgos Papaharalambous, Tasos Deyiannis, Stavros Dagtzidis and the video by Achilleas Savopoulos.

In search of the “other city”

We are looking at the city’s crossroads and walls, at the aimless wanderings of stray dogs and the fleeting glances of passers-by as we are constantly in search of the “other city”. When exploring our familiar urban place, we discover a parallel universe of heterotopias[1]- places recklessly drifting between reality and utopia. They resemble uncharted islets that are either places where we escape from the hustle and bustle of our ordinary lives or, places of exile for any and all our inclinations. Heteroclite aspects pass across each other within this universe of heterotopias: real and imaginary, ecumenical and personal, private and public.

There are heterotopias other than the ones described by Foucault –prisons, hospitals, museums, brothels- that are not so evident and live on the sly, almost representatively such as graffiti or wall to wall advertisements. Upon the walls, matter is crossed with written messages and echoes like a voice from “another place” that is trapped in cement. In other areas, the massive fancies of consumer society occupy the cold and impersonal facades of buildings, unexpectedly disguising them with the images of sensational models.

Still, these “other places” are not extending within the urban milieu; they are also the places that live within every man’s soul, the places that each one of us carries within him, our homelands, our experiences and memories that become apparent from glances and gestures. Even at a remote nudists’ beach, where bathers are free of the paraphernalia of their urban origin, the city continues to exist as an experience and inner sense. Art itself, as “another” way to comprehend and conceive reality, generates heterotopias. The artist can sabotage the standard image of a city that is a complex network of crossroads and traffic lights, and create from the original actual image “another place”: a city that levitates and escapes by gliding over its own reflection.

Accordingly, the work of art itself is an Heterotopy since it is uniting us with the world, it is here and it is everywhere at the same time, it contains simultaneously all places. Isn’t it true that a work of art can create a connection between us and other places, times, memories and sensations by perpetually weaving invisible networks of relations and crossroads?

Olga Karamitopoulou

Art historian



[1] Heterotopia: other place, from the Greek words

hetero= other and topos=place.

Foucault's idea of an heteropia is a single space

that contains all other spaces.


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