Curated by Anna Kafetsi
Duration | 14-12-2022 – 05-03-2023
Opening | 14-12-2022 | 20:00
Service Yard
Opening hours | Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday,
Saturday, Sunday 12:00 – 20:00
Thursday 12:00 – 22:00 (free admission)
Monday closed
Athens Concert Hall’s annexM inaugurates the exhibition Sites of Contemplation by Georgios Xenos, curated by Anna Kafetsi, which concludes our monographic exhibition series for 2022. Held at the Service Yard, the show will be open through 5 March 2023.
The exhibition presents 102 works, mainly paintings on paper, from various periods, in the artist’s archive, most of which go on public view for the first time. On display are large-scale wall-mounted multi-panel works, as well as installations taking the form of individual open-ended archives; also, a series of drawing variations on the same subject and notebooks, dating from the artist’s stay in Berlin to the present day. Also on view are photos taken and videos captured with a smartphone – a lesser-known facet of the artist’s diverse portfolio.
‘With or without their subject, or even against it, Anna Kafetsi notes, the archive loci of these works evoke discrete islands of order and disorder in the exhibition space, which give rise to multiple interpretations, inner paths of thought and silence, a longing for remembrance and return to the beginning. The centrepiece is the eponymous oversized art installation Places of Contemplation, placed in a circular arrangement.
Built around this introspective yet accessible to the viewer circle of reflection, the exhibition was curatorially conceived around the notion of a closed/open archive of images, sounds and concepts, hidden and revealed, a stage and a sanctum.
Public ‘murals’ without limits alternate with painted ‘miniatures’ and inaccessible archival drawings. Archetypal images of the home, empty interiors, labyrinths, humans as numbers, shadows, cryptic entries, puzzles, all work through infinite repetition to create unsettling topographies of confinement and release, meditation and self-immersion in black and white.
Dream – manifested in unintelligible writing with images– is not daydreaming; it is thinking. Hidden within are hieroglyphs of trauma, revealing fears and obsessions. The headless body stares from the depths of the black mirror. A psychoanalytic reading is established on a multitude of theatre stages.
Genealogies of solitary thinkers against a black sun and anonymous, faceless crowds allegorize destructions in history and their exile. Their archival condition mobilize a political space beyond subject matter and representation.
The blue miniature – uncomfortably conspicuous, unique, without an archival family –gives colour a name. And the exiled poet observes us from the pedestal.
This exhibition does not prescribe its own reading. Not even that of the creator of the archive. Rather, it seeks to leave viewers alone before the work, which looks back at them in turn, to leave the work alone with them. So that they may pass by it in silence, as another archive series, and take time for contemplation. May this be its own moral and political statement.’
Artist’s Bio
Georgios Xenos was born in Athens in 1953. From 1976 to 1982 he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts – Section des Arts Plastiques in Paris. From 1988 to 1992 he lived and worked in Berlin. From his studios in East and West Berlin, he experienced the historic events of the fall of the Wall. Since 1993 he has been living and working in Athens.
His works have been featured in museums in Greece and other countries.
Admission
5€ • 3€ (students aged 6 and older; university, TEI or equivalent students; persons aged 65+; unemployed persons with the presentation of an OAED card; large families)
Free admission on Thursdays