Petros Efstathiadis and Marina Velisioti present their first joint exhibition 'Other Suns Other Planets' at Dio Horia Gallery.
Dio Horia is excited to announce ‘Other Suns Other Planets’, a joint exhibition by Greek artists Marina Velisioti and Petros Efstathiadis. The exhibition will open on April 10 at 7:00 PM at Dio Horia Gallery in Acropolis, with the artists in presence.
Marina Velisioti is an Athens-based multidisciplinary artist whose work in textiles, ceramics, video, sound, and installation engages the themes of esoterica and speculative realities as the ground to discover and explore previously unthought connections and alternative historical narratives that may contradict commonly accepted dogmas.
Petros Efstathiadis’s primary medium is photography, yet his practice is grounded in the physical materiality of everyday consumer detritus and in sculptural gesture. Efstathiadis’s main oeuvre is comprised of photographs of assemblage sculptures and installations constructed from found objects around the artist’s hometown of Liparo.
The two bodies of work on view are united by the shared aspiration to stage an exit from the normative logics and false mores of the late capitalist hellscape’s relentless acceleration.
Marina Velisioti’s artistic subjects for the works on view—as well as the source of endless inspiration for most of her practice—are UFOs and the alternative worlds of both fiction and crypto-science alike. The pieces included in the show revolve around sci-fi’s common accoutrement to alien planets and intergalactic travel: gates and portals. Taking an aesthetic cue from the style idiom and color schemes of the Memphis group’s bright 1980s neon hues and groundbreakingly postmodernist rearticulations of Art Deco geometry, Velisioti revivifies their programmatically anachronistic logic to create a visual and conceptual dialogue between the ancient and the speculative knowledge realms that invite the viewer to explore the space where reality and fantasy converge. In this way, the artist’s embroideries, floating along the gallery walls like portals to a different civilizational dimension, appear as if implements of some mythic pre-Columbian Incan ritual were to be designed by MTV’s art director circa 1984.
Velisioti’s bold deployment of color and decade-hopping suggest further and more profound implications, as well. When faced with new primary colors he’s never seen before, colors that don’t exist on Earth, and that the regular earthly vocabulary doesn’t have the language to justly describe, one of the protagonists of David Lindsay’s classic Art Deco-era sci-fi novel A Voyage to Arcturus finds himself in need to resort to the purely sensual: “Just as blue is delicate and mysterious, yellow clear and unsubtle, and red sanguine and passionate, he felt [the new colors] to be wild and painful; and dreamlike, devilish, and voluptuous.” In his analysis and critique of Lindsay’s conceptual invention, Fredric Jameson has once written that from it, we may posit an allegorical relationship between the two: to be able to imagine a new color is allegorical of being able to imagine a completely new social order, “for a new quality already begins to demand a new kind of perception, and that new perception in turn a new organ of perception, and that ultimately a new kind of body,” and, we might add, a new form of citizenship and society-building.
Velisioti’s installation is, indeed, enriched by a perpetually oscillating variety of sensual textures and haptic experiences: the stand-alone ceramic and textile pieces are interspersed by running tracks of self-adhesive mirror strips, adding complex layers to the viewer’s experience through the intermix of matt and reflective surfaces that multiply and distort the space, enhancing the idea of exiting into a different reality from the one that lays outside the gallery walls. The tactile nature of the ceramics and embroideries further contrasts with the ethereal quality of the mirrors, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined, the tangible and the optical. Finally, the fluorescent lamps in the light installations further contribute to this otherworldly ambiance, infusing the gallery with an eerie, dreamlike glow. Together, these elements invite the viewer to step into a world where time and perception are fluid, and the line between the known and the unknown remains constantly shifting.
Where Velisioti’s work issues an invitation to exit the economic and socio-political circumstances of the world outside the gallery by turning away from it, Petros Efstathiadis’s pieces do so by zooming in on that world’s grimiest and most mundane details. Efstathiadis composes the assemblages that in turn become the subjects of his photographs out of such commonplace consumer discard as technologically obsolete audio CDs, broken office chairs, unusable computer motherboards and speakers, or broken-off fan ventilators. These, and a panoply of other scavenged “trash,” are interspersed with flowers, hay, tree branches, and other natural materials, and staged to be photographed in bucolic settings. Frontally framed and symmetrically composed, the resulting images suggest a sardonic update of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s canonical photographs of the early 20th century industrial architecture: where the dawn of the Modern era once optimistically celebrated the landscape footprint of industry and capital, our times have come to redefine Utopia as an escape from their economies of circulation and utility.
At the core of Efstathiadis’s work is an exploration of the meanings and the powers that manufactured objects can wield and signify, as if imbued with an agency of their own. In his usual practice, once a perfect shot is taken, the artist disassembles the sculptures again, returning all of their constituent materials to where they were originally procured. The present exhibition, however, marks a historical departure from this custom: for the first time ever, one of the Efstathiadis’s assemblages will be physically present in the exhibition space for the viewers’ contemplation. In the artist’s understanding, all objects “have a certain power that defines and dictates the way the work composed of them evolves. The narrative changes when the object is too dominant. This time, the sculpture took over my narrative completely, and it deserved to be exposed in a space without photography. I felt excited to let it be.”
In their unique, yet complementary ways, the two bodies of work on view in the exhibition propose different angles for a radical rethinking of the current economic and political models dominating the Western world and suggest a vision of the logic of Degrowth that may just help to finally see an alternative to them.