Chez eux: unseen Collections / Curated by Stamatia Dimitrakopoulos
June 9 – 25, 2016
Loukia Alavanou / Benjamin Verhoeven, Andreas Angelidakis / Dakis Joannou, Antonakis / James McLardy, Dimitrios Antonitsis / Meret Oppenheim, Manolis Daskalakis Lemos / Florian Goldmann, Panos Haralabous / George Lappas, Dionisis Kavallieratos / Elise Provencher and Fillipos Kavakas, Konstantin Kakanias / Νan Goldin, Katerina Kana / Nino Stelzl, Stelios Karamanolis and Tula Plumi / Rhinoceros (Audio drama), Miltos Manetas / Petra Cortright, Theo Michael / Francis Alÿs, Maria Papadimitriou / Martin Kippenberger, Katerina Würthle and Michel Würthle, Panos Papadopoulos / Elisabeth Penkel, Rena Papaspyrou / Bia Davou, Angelo Plessas / Zoë Paul and Santiago Taccetti, Mima Razelou / Takis, Kostas Sahpazis / Zoe Giabouldaki, Panos Tsagaris / Rachel Garrard, Alexandros Tzannis / Markus Selg, Jannis Varelas / Ben Wolf Noam, Kostas Varotsos / Michelangelo Pistoletto, Kostis Velonis / Johannes Schweiger, Poka Yio / Yorgos Vakirtzis
photos: Constantinos Caravatellis
Chez Eux: Unseen Collections maps a network that has not yet been historically recorded. It uncovers an unseen and intimate contemporary art circuit and depicts the real and substantial presence of people intersecting in each other’s lives, revealing influences on their artistic practices through a reality that is reliant on memory.
The art collections of 25 Greek artists covering a spectrum from the 70’s until today, are exhibited in Chez Eux: Unseen Collections. The project displays works that have been gifted or acquired through exchange between artists. These artworks are accompanied by selective archival material, illustrating the relationships between them; the archive varies from books, ephemera, correspondence, photos, drawings, clothes and other paraphernalia of emotional value. The artists discuss their relationships in interviews presented as video installations.
In Chez Eux: Unseen Collections, historiography is perceived as a creative practice and a form of production, which ultimately embodies the process of uncovering and discovering. It uncovers artworks which may have never been exhibited in the past, demonstrating the hidden treasure that can be found in a domestic context and discovers relations between artists that were shaped in the context of an intersection of different routes.
Adopting the installation model of the 90’s relational aesthetics, the basement of Project Space is being recast into a referential simulation of the actual domestic environment where the project has been conceived, formed and developed until the moment of its final execution and transformation into a group exhibition.
In this room, the curator creates her own collection of collections. Her bedroom functions as a spatial metaphor of a digital mood-board, referring to the postmodern construction of “pastness” in contemporary youth microblogs (tumblr, etc). It creates an aesthetic practice based on self-indulgent nostalgia.
The space takes the form of a “third place”, a location between a white cube and a domestic environment that oscillates between the domestic and public space. Here, the experience of the work is achieved through participation in this stimulated representation that extends out of the walls of the show and enters the project’s website, a platform ultimately integrated into the curator’s own referential universe, blurring the lines between historical and fictional narratives.
In Chez Eux: Unseen Collections, the researcher becomes the architect, inhabitant, curator and narrator of the artists’ personal stories.