annexM, under the artistic direction of Anna Kafetsi, launches its autumn programme at Megaron the Athens Concert Hall with two new productions, presented from 4 November 2021 to 23 January 2022 at the Service Yard and the Project Space. They are the solo exhibitions Heroes’ Garden by Kostas Roussakis and 212 Medea (Narratives from a place in limbo) by Stefania Strouza, curated respectively by Christos Chrysopoulos and Daphne Dragona.
Kostas Roussakis
Heroes’ Garden
A double enclosure. Walking along the corridor leading to the Service Yard, in the bowels of Megaron, the viewer discovers the installation, consisting of three solid sculpted volumes which contain, within them, a particular stereoscopic view of the Pedion Areos public space, accessible individually –almost intimately– to the gaze of each viewer.
The exhibition of Kostas Roussakis, curated by Christos Chrysopoulos, draws its raw material from the Pedion Areos public park of Athens, together with all its current connotations (historical, artistic, political, urban life related) and the semiotics that have been attributed to it from time to time (sculptures, statues, The Avenue of Heroes, monuments, garden etc.).
Its central axis is the monumental ensemble of “The Avenue of Heroes”. Within Megaron’s Service Yard, Roussakis’ installation forms a visual environment that metabolizes the familiar area of the Pedion Areos park, creating a new, ephemeral subjective landmark for the city’s history and modern life.
Stefania Strouza
212 Medea (Recited from an Empty Middle)
With a number of works presented for the first time in Greece –two of which were created especially for the exhibition–, the artist refers to the suspended condition in which the planet finds itself today. She focuses on moments of conflict, on imprints of disaster and on the possibility of reparation and regeneration. The exhibition takes its title from the asteroid named 212 Medea, which occupied Stefania Strouza in the context of her artistic and research work on the myth of Medea. Upon entering the Earth’s atmosphere, asteroids are transformed into shooting stars which are also earth-threatening bodies in the event of a collision. Medea is identified with the unpredictable and the destructive but also with the opposition to the self-evident and the imposed. In studying her story, Strouza focuses on an unexplored aspect of her character that demonstrates the anti-heroine’s relation to natural phenomena, animal instincts and the Earth itself, while at the same time always remaining alienated herself. For the artist, the existence of asteroid 212 Medea is a trigger for producing a visual narrative in which the myth’s modern connotations in relation to the natural environment are revealed.
The exhibition presents three sculptures and one video. The sculptures are suggestive of bodies geological and cosmic, human and non-human, material and active, bodies that bear traces of collision but at the same time can bring about changes. Centrally placed is the sculpture 212 Medea (Perpetual Silence Prevails in the Empty Space of Capital), which resembles both an asteroid on a collision course and a female body, referring to the relation between gender identity and the climate crisis. The sculpture 212 Medea (If only I had stayed the animal I was) refers to the acknowledgment of other living worlds beyond the human, while the smaller sculptures SPK-ID 2000212 (A880 CA), in the form of fragments, are a reference to the flows of matter, to moments of explosion and constant transformation. Finally, the video Monologue (Medean Remix) is based on excerpts from the works of Euripides, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Heiner Müller. In this, Medea recalls and embodies the fundamental relations between ‘nature’ and culture, as well as between humans and other living beings
Biographical notes
Stefania Strouza is a visual artist living and working in Athens. Her practice examines cultural narratives of different time periods and how they, through their interrelations, produce new hybrid identities. The artist creates sculptural works and installations that draw associations between the symbolic world of objects and notions of temporality, corporeality and geography. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the 3rd Industrial Art Biennial in Croatia, Pinta Miami 2018, the Benaki Museum, the Archaeological Museum of Mykonos (NEON & the Whitechapel Gallery), the 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, a.antonopoulou.art (solo), the Wiener Art Foundation (solo), the Neue Galerie Innsbruck (solo), the Athens & Epidaurus Festival (solo), the BOZAR Foundation in Brussels, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, among others. Strouza has received numerous accolades such as the Inspire Prize 2021, the ARTWORKS Award (Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Program), the Emerging Artists Award of the National Bank of Greece, and the Diploma Award of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Architecture Department of the University of Thessaly.
Daphne Dragona is an independent curator of exhibitions and cultural events based in Berlin. Exhibitions or actions curated by her have been hosted in the premises of numerous cultural institutions, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST, Athens), Onassis STEGI (Athens), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), the European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), Laboral (Gijon), Aksioma (Ljubljana), NeMe (Limassol), Alta Tecnologia Andina (Lima), and Le Lieu Unique (Nantes). From 2015 to 2019, she was part of the core curatorial team of transmediale, festival for art and digital culture (Berlin). Articles by her have appeared in books, magazines, academic journals and exhibition catalogues published by Diaphanes, Springer, Sternberg Press, Leonardo Electronic Almanac and other publishers. She has participated in evaluation committees in the context of conferences and festivals such as ISEA, as well as in fellowship programmes such as the Niarchos Foundation’sARTWORKS programme. She holds a PhD from the Department of Communication and Media Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
